Taming the West
Harriet Waugh
In a High Place Joanne Meschery (The tIodleY Head £7.50) In a High Place Joanne Meschery (The tIodleY Head £7.50)
American Romanticism in literature grew up out of the great western Pioneering migration. It has never needed to look further than its own front door- step. In recent years a brand of female fic- tional romanticism has grown up out of the Old one: a woman, often divorced, sometimes encumbered with a child, leaves the city with its sophistication, technology, trash-cans, ex-husbands and even careers, and goes in search of her id among the natural elements that her ancestors had Fought, conquered and embraced in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a very feminine quest for earthly renewal. Joanne Meschery's first novel, In a High Place, follows in the footsteps of this new tradition. The author has successfully wrested from it a strong, vigorous, mature b00k with none of the silliness that sometimes goes into the thinking behind tins idea. The heroine, Lily Baldwin, is divorced from her husband, Paul, and has moved with her three children and dog ,away from him and her own family in San Francisco to a Californian mountain town called Tullease. She is looking for a simpler, more solid life and thinks that she has beautiful, it there. But the mountain, although Deautiful, is dangerous and the climate, atithour, 6 healthy, changeable and intrac- Also 11 Also she has not bargained on how rulielY se woud fee. The inhabitants f lease,h l while beingl perfectly friendly too he r° are not her friends. She is on the out-
side of a close-knit community, looking in. This means that she is thrown back upon her children for emotional sustenance. Still suffering dislocation, the strain she is feel- ing is subtly demonstrated by the children's friendly anarchy: they take to going to sleep at night in their clothes so that they are ready, without effort, for school in the morning and, puppy-like, crowd together in each other's beds. It is as though they feel the need for comfort although they are not happy.
Lily takes the youngest child, John Paul, to bed for company. Her feeling for him is more direct than it is for her daughters. There is an excellent description in which she falls into uncontrollable rage with them. Altogether it is the best portrayal of unsen- timental maternal love that I have read. All this leads to her having a mild breakdown when a neighbour's child, a friend of John Paul, the son of another woman without a man, is lost in a blizzard on the mountain when on an outing with her. His absence shadows and unifies what happens in the rest of the novel, and allows the widening out of the book's theme. The heart of the story lies with the mountain town, Tullease, and the changes that the inhabitants are about to suffer to their traditional way of life. Progress, under the guise of Walt Disney Incorporated, intends to develop the town as a ski resort.
Lily's collapse and the crisis of the miss- ing boy weld her to the community. The town's old-timers look after her and mend her. I had difficulty with suspending disbelief at this point, as the old-timers, resemble nothing so much as the Seven Dwarfs to Lily Baldwin's Snow White. From this moment the town, its history and the impending change it faces are woven in- to Lily's relationship with two of the in- habitants. The first one is Charlotte, the mother of the missing child. In a scene in which Miss Meschery beautifully illustrates the way, people can behave un- characteristically according to their physical circumstances, the two women come to love each other through mutual grief. With
Charlotte's teenage daughter, they bawl together out of doors, in the snow, on a freezing evening. 'Charlotte glanced over at Sandy as though she'd just now realised the girl was there. "We should be inside" she said in a choked voice. But Sandy shook her head and wailed louder, knowing that they could never carry on like this in the house. Even Lily understood, refusing to budge, unwilling to quiet herself.' One of the strengths of Joanne Meschery's writing is that she succeeds in showing considerable female sensibility without being either em- barassing or banal.
The second relationship is with the coun- try man, Deegan, who, hewn out of the railroad that crosses the mountain, represents the full-blooded virtues of Tullease. He is a romantic fiction but sur- vives better than most because Miss Meschery's treatment of him is original. He represents the romance of the pioneering west grown old. Just as the town is assaulted by tourists, innovation and hygienic good taste, so is Deegan assaulted by auguries of old age after a life-time of exceptional virility (`he gives women fevers') which, he complacently explains, comes of having 'demanding flesh'.
There are a few faults — one of them be- ing the old-timers, with their stories of the mountain and the old days. They are pretty long-winded fellows and as characters suf- fer from a familiar quaintness that belongs to a time-honoured American tradition. Although one assumes that the inhabitants of the Californian mountains are as the author portrays them, their familiarity should be sufficient reason for them to be dealt with in shorthand rather than lovingly delineated.
It is, however, a good, dense, ac- complished first novel, infused with op- timism about the basic decency of people. Not a very fashionable point of view at this time, and one that is far more difficult to put across interestingly than the shallowly complex characters that people most modern novels. An intelligent, life- enhancing book.
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