Customer Reviews

Fair Land, Fair Land

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In Fair Land, Fair Land, A.B. Guthrie wrapped up the Old West part of his 6 novel series of the West. Guthrie had actually skipped over the period from 1845 to 1870 when he originally went from The Way West to These Thousand Hills. He was later convinced in 1982 to go back and finish the tale of Dick Summers.

Guthrie places Summers in an extended autumn both of his own life and that of the old Indian way of life. Although Summers is over 70 by the end of the tale, he never really quite gets old - just a little 'ganted up'. Summers finds love with Teal Eye (Boone Caudill's foolishly rejected spouse) and companionship with Higgins - Hig - as they drift along in an idyllic life (if living on the prairie in the shadow of the Montana mountains can really be an idyll). Summers also meets up with his former trail mate Boone Caudill for a reckoning over Caudill's murder of Jim Deakins, but that denouement becomes almost anti-climactic.

The telling is somewhat uneven (a stint living in a gold mining town seems like something stuck on to the story for no particular good reason), but Guthrie's love of Montana is evident in his description of the Bitteroot Valley. I literally was looking for an atlas to see just where this beautiful place was (and is).

But the idyll does come to an end. The game gradually gets harder and harder to find, whites intrude more closely, and finally the soldiers come to establish a fort. The book ends with the Marias River Massacre. Perhaps the worst slaughter of Indians by the US Army, the history is related in Larry McMurtry's recent offering 'Oh, What a Slaughter'. Guthrie includes the shouted warning by one of the white scouts 'wrong camp!', but the soldiers don't really care and shoot down these peaceable Piegan Blackfoot because they were at hand and the hostiles had already fled.

There's no way to make of this era a happy story and Guthrie doesn't try. A fine ending to the Dick Summers trilogy. Highly recommended.

If you liked Big Sky you will enjoy the ongoing tale presented here. Guthrie presents a smoothly paced story of the last days of the mountain men, their challenges, their friends, and their women.

Guthrie's continuation of his first two masterpieces is disappointing and regretable. Its almost as if he looked in the future and watched Dances with Wolves, a shallow film at best. No one of any education doubts the abuse Native Americans suffered; yet Guthrie's idyllic discription of camp life with Teal Eye, Higgins, and his wife is something for Good Housekeeping. While a knowledgible reader could accept this as an author's license, it is his shallow character follow-through (principly Boone Caudill) that makes this book so disappointing. With Big Sky Guthrie created, in Stegner's words, "an American archtype;" a complex youth, fashioned by a harsh and impoverished up-bringing, with a purely American mind-set (as Tocqueville recognized)run-away to the American frontier. A youth so fashioned by the beauty and harshness of nature, he rejects human nature itself and civilization to the point that even the Native Americans shun him. It is fair to say that no western European, raised in Europe could have become a Boone Caudill.

It is this character that I had so hoped Guthrie would continue with. We are teased and led at the end of Big Sky to speculate that Caudill, realizing his error, his humanity and in-humanity is moved to some suffering and redemption. It would seem that 30 years later, Guthrie hadnt the inclination or interest in picking up where he left off. It would have been understood that Caudill came to end as described in Fair Land, Fair, Land, had we known what he suffered, or failed to learn in the intervening years before he met up with Summers. Instead, his most complex character is really never present in the book. Are we to understand that he regressed even further because of his terrible deed; or he was no more than an animal to begin with? Guthrie leaves us hanging and it is a shame.

I ordered this book and had to return it right away because the print was cut off on the bottom of many of the pages making the book unreadable. I re-ordered the book and the same thing. I will look elsewhere to purchase the book because I really want to read this book. :(

Having read both of the preceding novels, The Big Sky and The Way West, I looked forward to this third installment in the six-book Big Sky series. But Guthrie's undoubted gift for description and story telling fails him in this novel for some unaccountable reason. This book could be considered a halfway decent Western, perhaps, if it had been written by anyone else. And if you really want to know what happened to Dick Summers after his adventures in the first two novels, you should plow ahead and read this sequel. But if you are expecting writing of the quality that earned Guthrie a Pulitzer Prize, look elsewhere. Here, he either telegraphs what's going to happen well in advance of the action or he springs a surprise (as where one of the protagonists meets his end) in a way that is unsatisfying at best. For Guthrie, this book is a pedestrian effort; and I feel no desire to continue with the series after this disappointment. Stick with the first two novels, each of which is excellent.