Living and partly living
Colin Thubron
BAD LAND by Jonathan Raban Picador, £15.99, pp. 326 From a mosaic of diaries, photos, personal conversations and research, Jonathan Raban has resurrected in Bad Land the ordeal of the last wave of migrants to Montana in the early 20th century. To European eyes this may seem a narrow canvas, but in many ways the migra- tion was a classic American epic, infused by pioneer dreaming, farmer's grit and misery, and political manipulation. In Raban's hands the tale takes on a black magic. This is not the western Montana of photogenic badlands, towering Rockies and A River Runs Through It, but the treeless vacancy of the eastern plains. Raban describes a land of numbing horizons, still haunted by ruins which were at first enigmatic to him. What had happened to this country? Where had the people gone? In 1909, with the government and rail- road corporations promoting immigration here, would-be farmers began arriving from Europe, acquired their 320-acre conces- sions and started to plough the land for wheat. For a few lucky years of high rain- fall and rising grain prices, it looked like working. But the arable earth was only a thin layer over a dead subsoil. When droughts came, this frail skin flaked away in the wind. The homesteaders had mostly been encouraged to take out loans on farm equipment, and they now entered a vortex of debt. Those who stuck to the land survived, in a modest way. But most abdicated in despair after five, ten, 20 years, sold up for a pittance and moved on west.
Raban approaches this era obliquely, through the eyes of others. His subtle exploration of their aspirations, values, sen- sibilities, is ballasted by a history which eventually becomes urgent and sometimes tragic.
Most memorable are his imaginative excursions into the homesteaders' mentali- ty. He runs to earth several of their descen- dants, even their unpublished writings, and observes the traces of whatever they have left behind. There is a masterly evocation of the visual impact of the prairie on a people accustomed to the constricted skylines of Europe, and now condemned to be visual orphans. Another detour takes us into the work of the local photographer Evelyn Cameron, whose pictures follow a bitter trajectory from spare, early beauty to a denouement as propaganda in prettified brochures to lure farmers west.
In the end the prairie, of course, imposed its own rules. It responded chiefly to cattle-breeding, not to grain. The agri- cultural fads which led so many settlers to their fate turned out to be pseudo-science, as misplaced as similar hopes in the con- temporary Soviet Union.
But as the population thinned, the sur- vivors began tentatively to prosper. Some- times they physically carried away the abandoned houses to enlarge their own homesteads, so that these have now become weird accretions 'in which the walls of every spare bedroom are stained with somebody's despair'.
Bad Land is less a travel book than the recovery of a dark past, with the help of both the living and the dead. It is subtly more ambitious — and more deeply inte- grated — than Raban's other study of immigration, Hunting Mister Heartbreak: full of ironies and a tough sympathy.
To order a signed copy of this book at the special discount price of £12.99, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 324 5500.
No Mr Wentworth — we're writing your will'
Previous page
