#24: Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads -- Richard Grant

To be sitting in a New York bar and fall prey to a sudden urge to go to Texas, Montana or Mexico, and be able to leave in the morning without a care -- this was my idea of freedom, my definition of success in life.(p.90)

Ghost Riders is an exploration of various forms of nomadism in modern America -- retirees in motorhomes, cowboys, tramps, rail-riders, reenactors, hippies -- and the history of wanderlust from the earliest Spanish explorations to the author's own desire to flee commitment and his sedentary lifestyle. Like many of the best travel books, it interweaves history, anecdote, biography and reflection.

And like many of the non-fiction books I read, it's taken me a while, dipping in for a page or reading several chapters in a day. I started reading this on the plane to California last November ...

"In London I would not have reacted to a relationship breakup by walking out to the highway and raising my thumb," confesses the author in the first few pages. "These restless, roaming urges [were] something that happened to me in America, something that happened to a persistent minority of all Europeans who crossed the Atlantic. ... If you dig down to the roots of American wanderlust, it is a process of going native, of Europeans being conquered by America -- by the immensity of its geography and the nomadic cultures they found here."

The urge has been there for centuries. Cabeza de Vaca, author of Adventures in the Unknown Interior, experienced an 'odyssey of transformation' in the early 16th century.

Its themes -- the epic, searching journey towards the sunset, spiritual transformation in the wilderness, the hope of building a new and better world -- seem characteristically American because, in a way, Cabeza de Vaca had become an American by the time he wrote it. He had been through an odyssey that was not possible in Europe. (p.44)

American nomadism has different parameters, different roots, to anything in Eurasian experience. It's not about leaving and coming back. It's not even about travel, for as Grant points out, "When travel becomes constant, it alters its meaning, at least in sedentary languages. It is no longer a trip away from somewhere. In a sense nomads never leave." He examines the American nomad, the lone horseman, in literature -- both fiction and (auto)biography -- and finds a key difference.

Unlike Odysseus, or all those medieval knights-errant, Leatherstocking [the hero of novels by James Fenimore Cooper] did not return and reunite with his family and community after his long, questing journey. At the end of the story -- an old man now, still unmarried and quite possibly a virgin -- Leatherstocking rides off again 'to seek a final refuge against society in the broad and tenantless plains of the west'.(p.166)

The tenantless plains are an integral part of the myth. Grant refers to 'riding out for the biggest blank spaces left on the map', and talks to men who, returning from one directionless trek on horseback, are already planning the next. "America is basically going down the toilet as far as I'm concerned," [one cowboy] says. "But in the West, at least, you can still make a trip like that, if you carry a pair of fence-cutters and take a few chances with the game laws. Where else in the world could you do it? Most countries won't even let you carry a gun." (p.171)

The mythology of America crops up in unexpected places. Here's Grant, being shown an earth intaglio of a horse which might date from a Spanish expedition of 1540. The intaglio's origins are expounded by a government archaeologist who happens to be a Mormon:

Mormonism is a fundamentalist faith, and its sacred text, the Book of Mormon, states that America at the time of Christ was populated by two lost tribes of Israel, who possessed horses, sheep, goats, pigs, oxen, elephants, wheeled chariots and metal swords -- none of which have turned up in the archaeological record. .. Mormonism is perhaps the most awkward of all the world's religions for an archaeologist to believe in. (p76-7)

"Americans tell me," says Grant, "that it's a European tendency to look for the broad historical perspective behind a contemporary phenomenon." Which is what he's trying to do throughout: put things in a historical context, identify trends and tribes and types. (There's an intriguing thread of impalement legends, from a Spanish horseman impaled on his own lance to a stretch of I95 in Florida where three drivers, in three separate incidents, were pinned to their cars by unsecured metal rods flying free from other vehicles.)

I found the chapters on the interaction of Indians and Europeans -- from the earliest contact to the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century, Indians versus Argonauts in a war of few battles that halved the population of the Cheyenne and Comanche nations -- especially fascinating, as they resonate with some other recent reading (The Tenderness of Wolves; The Last Witchfinder; The Unredeemed Captive).

On the Muskingum River in 1764 a captive exchange took place ... The Indian prisoners ran back to their tribe with signs of great joy. The white captives had to be bound hand and foot, kicking and screaming, and forcibly dragged back to the emissaries of civilisation. Later, many of them escaped from their rescuers and went back to live with the Indians. (p.125)

A lot of the nomads Grant meets, from cowboys to mountain men, claim Indian heritage (as an excuse or explanation?) Apparently the number of Americans claiming Cherokee blood is demographically impossible. And those nomads who are Indian, or part-Indian, reject 'civilised' sedentary life for pragmatic reasons:

"Indians become alcoholics for the same reason they become diabetics: we're not physiologically equipped to deal with booze or junk food. .. It was the same with all those other diseases the Europeans brought us ... How long does it take you to get over a cold? Two weeks max, right? For us it's thirty to sixty days, and the purer the blood, the longer it takes." (p.185)

Then there's the modern Americans trying to recreate a splendid myth of peaceful nomadism. Grant (despite covert hippie tendencies revealed by his desire to die in the desert and "get picked clean by ants, and then to enter the bodies of ant-eating lizards and lizard-eating birds and coyotes, while my bones crumble into the soil and nourish a cactus or a juniper tree .. [that's] enough immortality for me") has little sympathy for the Rainbow Nation:

"I'm losing patience with hippies. I'm tired of being welcomed home a hundred times a day, tired of uninvited aura readings, tired of fakelore and the idea that vibes alone can change the world, and love is all you need. In my Babylon mind I'm more impressed by the practical workings of the Rainbow Gathering... They have succeeded in creating a functioning anarchist utopia." (p.228)

At least their form of anarchism works. Grant talks to hobos on mile-long freight trains and draws his own conclusions about the FTRA, or Freight Train Riders Association. The FTRA get a bad press for having been infiltrated by white supremacists, gangs and serial killers, but from Grant's investigations (and those of SF author Lucius Shepard, who rode the rails for a while and drew on his experiences to write Two Trains Running) the problems stem from a 'general breakdown in hobo society, the kind of anarchy that gives anarchy a bad name'.

There's a certain mournful emptiness to my mental images of American railways, but apparently there was a 'hot new craze' in the Nineties: "riding the rails with cellphones, GPS finders, down parkas, three-hundred-dollar tents, four-hundred-dollar sleeping-bags, and uploading your latest adventures to the yuppie hobo websites from laptop computers." (p.275)

When Grant confides to a much-travelled German lapis dealer -- encountered in a bar at Quartzite, Arizona (host to an annual event that's the largest American gathering of nomads) -- that he's going to write about snowbirds and RVs, he is mocked: "'These are not the true nomads! Take away their social security and the RV rolls to a halt. They are not truly free.'"

Grant's counter-arguments: "They have no fixed abode. They move with the seasons, there are probably a million of them, maybe three million. .. .. he and I are better described as travellers. True nomads exist within tightly knit groups. They are not necessarily looking for adventure. They follow a reliable, predictable migration pattern, which best ensures survival and does not cross oceans in search of new experiences." (p.297)

"The standard explanation of American restlessness," writes Grant, "is all about the prospect of getting rich ... The horizontal, geographical mobility of Americans, I have read in half a dozen books starting with Alexis de Tocqueville, is motivated by the hope of rising vertically in terms of wealth and social status." The RV community (predominantly female, simply because of the difference in life expectancy for men and women) is almost entirely made up of people who've spent their working life paying off the mortgage, raising a family and accumulating consumer goods -- but who then sell the house, buy a classier version of a VW camper van with the proceeds, and set off to where the weather's better (or at least different).

I found the sociology of the RV community fascinating: it's the sort of nomadism I can most easily imagine myself embracing in later life, travelling around in my own motorised 'home' with plenty of comforts. (Though perhaps not in the company of some of the people Grant meets.) Not least because, from Grant's account, it's one of the safest options for a woman alone and happy -- determined -- to stay that way.

The book finishes on an unexpected and wryly humorous note:

At this point in the narrative I am supposed to wander off into the sunset ... instead, I find myself pulled in the opposite direction, east towards Tucson, the comforts of home and the woman I love, which have also become necessary to my happiness.
In closing, I would like to thank the federal government and the hard-working agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Fear of deportation overcame deeper fears and prejudices and led to a wedding that should have taken place years ago." (p.308)

Richard Grant is clear-eyed and unromantic about nomadism, whether his own or that of the wanderers whose tales he hears. His prose is evocative without being overly poetic: despite the lack of a colour photo insert, I feel as though I've seen these places. And it's been a long strange trip.

#23: Gifts -- Ursula Le Guin

A fantasy novel about what one has and how one uses it: about story-telling and truth, and how one creates and shapes one's world.

Orrec possesses his family's Gift: undoing, the power to unmake, to destroy, simply by looking at a thing. His father can break a bowl by looking at it; blacken a willow wand; kill a rat. And Orrec's Gift is a powerful one, too powerful for safety. He blindfolds himself and lives in darkness rather than unwittingly destroy something he loves, as his ancestor Caddard Strong-Eye killed his wife.

His friend Gry also rejects her heritage, her Gift: she will not call animals to the hunt.

To see that your life's a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's to be known only when it's over.

Orrec's mother Melle is a Lowlander, without a Gift: only the Uplanders have Gifts, one per family. Yet she does have a talent, and that's story-telling. After visiting the Drum holding so that Orrec can be introduced to a marriageable girl, Melle falls sick. Her story-telling 'carried [them] out of the dark and the cold and the dreary boredom of being useless': and Melle begins to write down the stories she tells her son, teaching him to tell them too.

In the end it's Gry who, picking through the stories, begins to understand the nature of the Gifts: that they can be used 'forward as well as backward', for good as well as harm. Orrec is feared for his blindfold, for his destructive potential: he's on his way to becoming a living weapon. Gry , and Orrec's dog Coaly, and the arrival of Emmon (a thief and vagabond from the Lowlands) help him to learn the other aspects of his Gift -- and to discover the truth behind what his father has told him about the Caspro gift.

Le Guin's prose is lucid and simple and spare. There's seldom poetry, and no need for it because of the clarity of description.

I believed the story as I told it to myself, but not when it was over... I told it to myself so often that I wore it out, and then I had no story to tell at all.

#22: The Tenderness of Wolves -- Stef Penney

The Tenderness of Wolves is set in the wilds of 19th-century Canada, in a society of trappers, voyageurs and Indians that's already familiar to me from Margaret Elphinstone's Voyageurs. It's a murder mystery, as is clear from the very first page: Laurent, a reclusive Frenchman, is found jugulated and scalped, and suspicion falls upon Francis, the adoptive son of Mr and Mrs Ross, who's coincidentally gone missing.

Mrs Ross (this is how she thinks of herself) is a character of considerable depth: she's spent time in a lunatic asylum, and she understands human nature, and power games, better than anyone else realises. Her husband, Angus, doesn't understand her especially well: it's debateable whether she has any friends. She finds allies, however: Moody, the young Company agent who's sent to investigate, and Parker, half-Indian trapper who may have been in business with the murdered man. Thomas Sturrock, who has a reputation for tracking missing persons, arrives in town. Who will he follow?

I prepare to go into the wilderness with a suspected killer. What's worse, a man I haven't been properly introduced to.

Everything, everyone, in this novel seems connected by an intricate web of hinted backstory. Many lives touched by Francis' flight, by Laurent before his death, by Mrs Ross and Parker as they attempt to solve the crime, by Moody as he discovers new evidence concerning the disappearance of two girls, years before, by Sturrock as the secret of his famous failure (the Seton girls again) is gradually revealed. Things happen, too, because of Francis and Laurent and Mrs Knox and Sturrock. A Norwegian woman flees the refuge she sought after her husband's death. A mysterious bone tablet of immense significance is lost and found. Laurent's legacy endures even as his secrets are revealed.

Some secrets are carried to the grave. Some secrets never come to light at all. Not every death can be explained, not every survival will make sense. The wolves of the title may be more tender than the humans who encounter them. Or they may be wolves in sheeps' clothing.

(One of Laurent's secrets, which isn't only his, seemed ... wrong for that culture and society. Not what happened but how it was regarded by the protagonists and by others.)

This book received considerable publicity for its marvellous depiction of the Canadian wilderness, since the author has never visited Canada. (In the trade we call this 'imagination'.) I'm not entirely convinced. It feels accurate, and engaging, and credible: but I missed the surprising observations, the unique off-kilter perspectives, that come from life.

There are also times when I felt the grammar was getting away from me. A lot of the novel's written in first-person present tense, and combining that with past-tense flashbacks gave rise to some sentences that needed unravelling.

A pacy read, though the ending's quite open -- and bleak, in a sense, as Brokeback Mountain.

#21: Five from Me, Five from You -- Shelagh MacDonald

Mystery with mythological elements, set on the Greek island of Serifos: Pethi, a Greek boy who's grown up never knowing his father, and Tini, an English girl whose father's an archaeologist, decipher an ancient riddle and find themselves racing towards a treasure that's lain hidden for many centuries.

Reread after about thirty years: I recall enjoying this as a child, and I'm pleased to find that it's stood the test of time. The characters are as distinctive, the plot as intriguing, the setting as vivid as I remembered.

I remembered the answer to the riddle of that title; I remembered the cat who liked to drape himself over his owner's shoulders; I remembered the gliding handmaidens. But not much else: and half of what I thought I remembered wasn't in this book at all, which means it must be in A Circle of Stones -- the book that precedes this one, which I didn't recall ever having read.

I'd completely forgotten the mythological elements, and didn't spot the resonances with a certain myth until I read the author's afterword. This is how mythic elements are best handled: strong, simple tales retold in trappings that don't give them away. If I'd known which myth the story was (partly) based upon, I would have guessed a few aspects of the ending that came as a surprise to me all over again.

#20: The Testament of Gideon Mack -- James Robertson

This is the story of a modern-day Scottish minister who encounters the Devil. Probably.

It's a rather slow book. We're told what has happened right at the beginning, in the framing narrative and the first few pages of Gideon Mack's own Testament. But it's more than two hundred pages before the significant event finally occurs.

In the space of those two hundred-odd pages, we've learnt a lot about Gideon. The first half of the book is a memoir, covering his early life as a 'son of the manse' with a repressive, emotionally unavailable father and a weak mother; his escape to university and the changes that he experiences there; his marriage, his taking orders, his charitable works (he runs marathons to raise money for good causes) and the emptiness of his faith.

Then things start to change again. There's an ancient standing stone in the wood, where none stood before; a dear friend is dying, and another is committing adultery; and Gideon begins to question every unthinking restriction that he's used to prop up his life.

Then he falls into a gorge and meets someone who saves his life -- and simultaneously dooms him.

I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores.

Hard to say whether Gideon Mack is utterly mad, or terrifyingly sane. Harder still to say what it is he wants from his new friend.

There are passages which feel a little self-indulgent (Gideon discussing with a friend the rise of celebrity ghost-writing; his patronising observations concerning his fellow ministers; a gleefully obscure passage purporting to be an excerpt from a 19th-century work on folklore, apostrophes all over the place as if someone's slammed the book shut on a plague of corn lice) but the prose is smooth, wryly witty, with a distinctly Scots flavour.

Slow, but intriguing. Reminds me of Lolly Willowes (Sylvia Townsend Warner) except without the certainty.

#19: The Girls -- Lori Lansens

I love my sister as myself. I hate her that way too.

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, though I didn't have high hopes of it.

It's the story of two sisters, Rose and Ruby. Imagine having a sister who's quite different to you, who doesn't always understand you, who keeps secrets from you, who fancies the same boys (though sometimes fancies men you don't especially like), who's shared every significant experience of your life and yet doesn't share your goals: imagine trying to write a book with that sister.

Now imagine that you have never been apart from that sister in your life. That you are, literally, joined -- not at the hip but at the head.

Rose and Ruby are approaching their thirtieth birthday. If they make it that far, they'll be the oldest living craniopagus twins in history. If they make it.

Rose is the literary one: Ruby's dismissive of her own writing, and her chapters make up less than a third of the narrative. (It's in a different typeface, too.) Rose is trying to tell the story of herself and her sister, and their adoptive parents, and their wider family: the mother they never knew, the nurse (Aunt Lovey) who helped deliver them and raised them as her own, her husband (Uncle Stash) and his Slovakian family, the neighbour who lost her little boy to a tornado on the day the girls were born. The small town where they grow up, find work, live their lives. The friends who help them: the doctors who keep them alive.

The Girls is not only the story of Rose and Ruby's life, but also the story of how they write that life. Though they're not reading one another's chapters as they write, Rose is suspicious of Ruby's notions of pacing: Knowing Ruby, she wouldn't have considered how to present that crucial bit of information about her main characters. And it's from Ruby that we learn some vitally important facts about Rose.

But Rose is learning how to be a writer: 'don't finish, stop'; the joy of writing something that is 'rare and imperfect', instead of yearning for perfection and polish; how it feels when it flows.

Words leak from my brain. Seep out my ear. Burble from my crooked mouth. Splash on my shirt. Trickle onto my keyboard. Pool on my warped parquet floor. At least they're not gushing from my heart. Or, God forbid, my ass. I catch the words as they fall. My hands smell. And the place is a wreck. From all our spilled words.

The story doesn't linger on the less pleasant aspects of the girls' situation, though there is mention of various medical problems (and Rose's vivid recollection of one doctor calling her sister a 'parasite'). Instead, they celebrate their difference: the almost supernatural quality of being not only twins, but two-as-one. When Ruby speaks, Rose doesn't just hear the words: she feels them in the conjoined bones of their skulls. When something falls on Rose's head, it's Ruby who's dazed. When Ruby's kissed ...

There is some alienation, of course, in being so different, but it's also been fascinating, and a unique opportunity to have observed our generation without fully participating in it.

The novel's an interesting experiment in first person plural, too -- they fiercely resist singularisation (hate being called 'a mascot') yet think of themselves as 'we'. Neither can live without the other; neither can die alone.

The Girls is a marvellous novel: deeply-felt without sentimentality, a thought-provoking description of the writing process, a love story, a tale of two sisters. Very highly recommended.

#18: Bourbon Street Blues -- Greg Herren

Some years ago I suggested that there was a particular subset of contemporary crime writing that relied, in the main, on the maxim 'write what you know'. The formula's simple: write about your life (and possibly even your friends and enemies, cunningly disguised). This will provide a sturdy and coherent framework on which to hang a standard whodunnit plot, complete with local colour and rich characterisation.

I don't know Greg Herren, so I really couldn't say if this is that sort of book. It's certainly a rich and vivid evocation of the gay scene in New Orleans -- and, very distinctly, a pre-Katrina New Orleans. Writing about a plot to break the bayou would be seen, now, as gross bad taste. Writing about right-wing politicians, homophobia, tantric sex and hippie parents, on the other hand ... well, that's what New Orleans is all about, no?

Bourbon Street Blues is mostly set during Decadence, the gay festival held every Labour Day weekend in the city. Scott Bradley is a personal trainer by day, a bartop dancer by night. An acquaintance stumbles across suspicious activities, and pays the price: Scott, with the help of a gorgeous bloke from out of town, uncovers evidence of a really nasty plot.

I couldn't help feeling that Scott was a little naive at times. And I'm not convinced that Frank could hide his lifestyle from his employers. There's perhaps too much detail, too much scene-setting, in the first half of the novel too. But I did enjoy it and will be looking out for more from Herren -- whose evocation of flashy trashy fickle gay life is a refreshing change from gothy teens alone and palely loitering in French Quarter bars.