Happy days in Wyoming
Peter J. M. Wayne
AN UNFINISHED LIFE by Mark Spragg Cape, £16.99, pp. 257, ISBN 0224073540 kl5 £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 1 n the wake of a presidential election where both candidates' fervid speechifying 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 redblooded 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. It turns out that mother and ever so cute and precocious daughter Griff were once attached to Einar's long-dead only son. To make matters worse — and to set up the necessary apparatus from which to launch them all on the long and fraught road to family rapprochement — Einar can hardly bring himself to breathe the same air as his erstwhile daughter-in-law, as it was the same hapless Jean (still pregnant with Griff) who was driving the car that killed his beloved son in the first place.
Elmore Leonard remarked recently that readers should be able to visualise fictional characters entirely through what they say. Spragg, too, has a keen ear for the rhythms of vernacular without that necessarily detracting from the literary quality of his work. It is therefore a pity that his publishers had to stick their oar in by using the press release that accompanied my review copy of Spragg's book to advertise 'the forthcoming film' starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and 'Jaylo' Jennifer Lopez herself of the heavily insured behind. This announcement wholly destroyed the personal one-to-one relationship between author and reader, because having soon worked out who would be playing whom, I couldn't help but see this iconic trio's faces every time 'their' characters opened their mouths.
Spragg is a dab hand at writing through the eyes of his literary creations, whether it's the little girl watching a newscaster on TV 'talking about a whole lot of people who got killed and wagging his head smiling at the same time like he can't tell the difference between happy and sad', or Roy the vituperative 'ex', confident in 'the law of nature' that 'there ain't no woman in the world who can keep her mouth shut long enough ... that she won't need to get smacked at least once'.
And then there is always the questionable taste of classic American similes, viz, lips 'as red as a baboon's ass', folks who 'feel like warmed-over dog shit' after 'making love like wild minks' (alas, I have yet to see David Attenborough's illuminating film on that one).
An Unfinished Life (that of the dead son) is a meticulously assembled and highly polished piece of work with every loose end tied up with the efficiency of a Wyoming rail-scout. In this book even the grizzly bear is allocated a clearly mapped-out future, whilst each human character reaps exactly what he or she has sown. In many respects, Spragg has written a curiously
old-fashioned book about the mores of the New West, where ultimately Cinderella finds her prince and everybody lives happily ever after. These days, such wholesome fare doesn't come along that often. It is so easy to read, the pages almost turn themselves.
*John 3:16 reads: 'For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.'
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