The Big Sky
by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.

Read October 2007
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, White Bear Lake branch
Essay written January 26th, 2008

Awesome. This is the kind of Western that I can get into. I think reading The Power Of The Dog by Thomas Savage ignited a hunger in me for meaningful westerns. The Big Sky satisfies that hunger.

It started out as a voyage book, sort of. Boone leaves home, has adventures on his way to Saint Louis, get the clap on his way up the Missouri River to Montana, and so on. Then ten or fifteen years pass. So when it divides the novel up into "Book One," "Book Two," etc. instead of Parts, it really does feel like entirely different books, rather than different parts of the same novel.

There were language peculiarities I had to look up in my dictionary. Like "painter." It referred to painters, and from the context I could tell that was some sort of animal, but what kind of animal? I had never heard of a painter before. Turns out, it's a panther. American English either evolved away from that word, or that was a dead-end branch on the language evolution tree. Point is: I learned something. Furthermore, our verb "to rile," meaning to make someone or something annoyed or irritated, comes from the verb "to roil," as in to disturb a liquid and mix up the sediment in the bottom of it.

I'm dancing around the issue of what exactly makes this book so great, and I'm doing that because I don't know. It just is. Maybe if we knew what makes certain books so great they'd be handing out Pulitzer Prizes like they were participation awards. Speaking of Pulitzers, A.B. Guthrie, Jr. won one for the sequel to this book, The Way West. I don't put much stock in the Pulitzer Prize, because there are a lot of winners of it that I found crappy. Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love and American Pastoral for example. To Kill A Mockingbird was spectacular though, easily my favourite book that I've read that's won it.

It was a fabulous Western without being anything like your stereotypical Louis L'Amour style Western. Not even remotely formulaic or one-dimensional. Note to self: read more Guthrie.

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