Clare and others said that they found the opening a little difficult. The author brilliantly employs the technique of free indirect discourse, slipping fluidly between a narrative voice and perspective and those of a character, with often a mix of the two within a sentence. At the start the prose adopts the baroque poeticism of Tom as, not yet having met Polly, he wanders the 'stations of the cross' - ie the bars along the main street of the mining town of Butte - wondering depressively if he will end up 'old and mad and forgotten on the mountain': 'He was appalled at the charismatic light '; 'He walked as charity. He walked under Libra.' However, the moment Polly appears with her new husband in the photography studio where Tom works as an assistant, things take an earthier, more ironic turn. Clare picked out as an example this sentence describing Polly, chiefly from Tom's point of view, but with a sly authorial injection: 'Eyes of wren's egg blue and one inclined to say hello to the other but not unattractively'. Soon after, we are inside the cynical, demotic verbal world of Polly as we learn how, herself purporting to be something she wasn't, she has unwittingly married a self-flagellating religious fanatic. Ironically, indeed hilariously, it is a situation in which Tom has had a huge hand, since, as a literate man, he provides a service for other, illiterate immigrants, writing for them disingenuously romantic and courteous offers of marriage, with misrepresentative promises of a comfortable life. From this point on, we all agreed, the novel is a compelling read, and most of us read it in two sittings.
To begin with, we didn't really have a lot to say about it apart from the fact that we had liked it so much, how brilliant we thought the narrative voice, and how, in spite of Tom's criminality and Polly's hardness, Barry makes us understand and care for them, and want them to escape and succeed in the end. I said I wasn't too sure that the novel was about very much more than love - that existential connection which the pair have, and which for Tom is the only thing worth living for, and for which he would be happy to die. Doug said he did think that was exactly what it was about, and no one demurred.
Ann, however, had said very little up to this moment, and now she said that she was obviously going to be the dissenting voice about the book: she hadn't been taken by it at all. Very surprised, we asked her why. She said that perhaps it was because she read so many Westerns when she was a teenager, but she felt it was cliched - the whole scenario of outlaws with hearts of gold on the run and coming across various quirky others on their travels.
We thought about this. Clearly, the distinctive prose sets the novel apart from others, but it occurred to me also that Barry was consciously using a well-known template (in which, as Ann herself pointed out, there's always a hero, and always a happy ending) and subverting it. The real interest of this book, unlike that of the traditional Western, is psychological, concentrating on Tom's existential longings and fears and Polly's more realistic though no less moving grasp on the world, and the telepathic emotional connection between them. Clare added that, in contrast with the heroic mode of traditional Westerns, the novel exposes the hardship for immigrants in such late-nineteenth-century mining towns - the cultural barrenness, the sense of scraping a living, the drugs, and above all the violence. Someone noted that there is no sense in the novel of the presence of Native Americans, but we felt that that was probably historically correct - they would have been long driven from such places.
All in all, a novel the group generally very much enjoyed.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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