Happy days in Wyoming

In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection.

For the purposes of this quintessentially Great American Dream Fable, the reader finds himself transplanted straight back into the centre of that extensive splodge of gun-toting Republican red which dominated the TV pundits’ psephological maps, a remarkably beautiful backdrop for a novel centred around Yellowstone National Park, crowned by the ‘black and jagged’ Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, where, we are reliably informed, ‘men are men and the women smell like ’em’.

Protagonist Einar Gilkyson, an aging rancher of Scandinavian descent who orders his off-white longjohns from the ‘LL Bean catalog’, lives an austere kind of life with buddy from the Korean war ‘Mitch’ Bradley, a ‘chewed-to-shit’ black cowboy (he’s been almost mauled to death by a grizzly bear) who now survives on daily morphine shots administered by an uncomplainingly passive Einar. Given the unmistakable Whitmanesque atmosphere of much of this pastoral tale, it is tempting to read more than the author chooses to reveal about the exact nature of their relationship. Notwithstanding Einar’s status as gruff widower and still grieving father, these two are unhealthily, stultifyingly close for your regular whiskey-swilling red-blooded cowpunchers of world renown.

Into their secluded world is dropped the disruptive double act of Jean (who buys her clothes from a branch of the John 3:16 thrift shops)*, and her ten-year-old daughter, at first glance a pair of serial no-hopers from a trailer park somewhere in the back of beyond, two states further east in Iowa. In fact they are on the run from Jean’s abusive and thoroughly misanthropic boyfriend Roy — and in him Spragg has created an absolute worm of an arch-villain.