Customer Reviews

Fencing the Sky: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My parents live on 5 of those 40 acre parcels about which Mr. Galvin has so beautifully written, 200 acres that they have put their own touch upon. He has realistically portrayed the spirit of the people whose history has been undermined by development. Those who have encroached on this desolate place were also truthfully portrayed. It's a sad legacy that we all have to hand our children, my own included. I very much enjoyed this book, not only because I could intimately relate to the area, but because it was wonderfully, believably written. Mr. Galvin has the ability to convince a reader that they are within the story, with all senses experiencing the moment.

This is one of a number of modern Westerns I read in the winter of 2004-05. The others included: J. Robert Lennon's, "On The Night Plain," Annie Proulx' "Close Range"; Mark Spragg's "Fruit Of Stone", Ralph Beer's "The Blind Corral"; Gretel Ehrlich's "Heart Mountain", and David Long's "Blue Spruce", a collection of modern stories. I might also include Wallace Stegner's "Angle Of Repose" which is more of a historical Western though with more contemporary aspects, John Treadwell Nichols' "The New Mexico Trilogy",which seems to me now somewhat dated, or Rick De Marinis' "Year Of The Zinc Penny", set mostly in wartime L.A. in 1943 but about a family with Montana roots. If you only have time to read one--since they are somewhat repetitive, particularly in the areas of cattle or sheep ranching, horsemanship and descriptions of ranch life-- you might choose "Fencing The Sky" since it is one of the best, with Beer's great rather nostalgic novel perhaps second. This is a society in which tradition lasts longer than in some other areas of the country, certainly dating from the late 19th century.

All these novels & stories lament the passing of the Old West, but some--certainly "Fencing The Sky" and "Angle Of Repose" are also strikingly contemporary, dealing with such issues as 60's student radicalism,war service (Lennon, Beer, and Ehrlich) aggressive land development, and considerable ecological problems such as deforestation and strip mining which have laid waste to this part of the country, as Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse" also attests. Elk and elk hunting, and other naturalistic descriptions, are another subject common to all. At least three of the novels contain quite a lot of romance between siblings growing up on neighboring ranches in what will seem to some, including myself,to be a rather idyllic life, certainly the opposite of urban living.Some of the ranch details are truly inspired, such as a pack rat stealing from a cowboy in the middle of the night, or a square dance. Proulx' amazing award-winning stories are packed with historic details, in a limited space. Cowboys are unfortunately somewhat prone to alcoholism, also. Both Spragg and Galvin use a flashback technique in alternating chapters. Each novel is somewhat unique so that you can enjoy each but all have a great deal in common as well. Spragg's novel is most uniquely notable for its humour--a wayward wife,two old friends, an Indian, a dog, a physicist, and their misadventures.

James Galvin is a poet, and his vision of the people who inhabit the land where this story takes place is also poetic. Instead of a straightforward narrative from beginning to middle to end, it intermingles scenes from the lives of several characters told in flashbacks and flashforwards, all sequenced along the spine of a single plot line that involves the pursuit of a fugitive who has killed another man.

The location is northern Colorado and parts of Wyoming extending through the Great Divide Basin and northward into the mountains. The main characters are men with ties to the land -- a rancher, a cowboy, a doctor. Each is witness in his own way to the passing of the rural West and its replacement by land developers and the mining and logging industries.

They are also remnants of a code of honor that respects hard work, the individual, the land and its wildlife, and the values of courage, loyalty, and generosity. In particular, Galvin captures the nuances of friendship between these very individual men and the way matters of concern to them are often lightened with ironic and self-deprecating humor. I enjoyed this book and found myself caring very much for the welfare of its fugitive protagonist.

I recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in the modern West. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Frank Clifford's nonfiction book "Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide," which finds many of the same kinds of people from real life and explores in greater depth many of the land use issues raised by Galvin's book. As of this writing, "Fencing the Sky" seems to be going out of print. I'm hoping that it reappears shortly in paperback and has a new life for new readers in that format.

Being from New Jersey, and having a log cabin in upstate NY where I feel I have my own little piece of paradise, this book was a shot to the gut.

When rich city folk buy up most of the unclaimed land out west, and disrespect that land by tearing it up with dirtbikes and ATV's, and spook the cattle and make life hard for the ranchers who have lived there and made livings the hard, good ol' way, it made me change the way I felt about my own cabin. Seeing and feeling how disrespectful these newcomers were is greatly felt through the characters we get to know in this book.

Told through a series of flashbacks while our protagonist is fleeing from the law on horseback, we come to know and love the fugitive who was only standing up for his own moral rights. While this is the main outline for the plot, the deeper, real intention is the abuse the government forced upon landowners and ranchers in the west, claiming rights to dig up land regardless of ownership.

Overall, a sad story that hits home with impact and gives you chills as you turn the last few pages. I particularly enjoyed the last quarter of the book the most. Please read and try to understand the loss many landowners out west feel about the destruction of good land, turned into a 'wilderness escape' for wealthy personel.

If Wyoming poet James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky" were the last Western novel ever written, the genre would have come full circle: A melodrama in which violence is righteous if committed in the name of protecting the good folks who scratch out a meager existence in an unconquerable landscape.

The plot is a timeworn Western motif: Greed versus idealism. But the book itself, intentionally or not, is a unique artifact of Western consciousness and environment. Its moments of lyric natural beauty -- and there are many -- are occasionally obscured by old-fashioned doctrinaire preachiness, like the ageless mountains behind Denver's brown cloud. Something funny happened on the way to the ranch, and we have forgotten that the now-romanticized ranchers and cowboys who settled this country were, in many ways, no less exploitive and ambitious than the developers who have now replaced railroad barons as the bad guys in regional fiction. It wasn't all that long ago that the bad guys in our stories were the guys who built fences and shot sheepherders. The landscape of Western literature doesn't change, only the good guys and the bad guys.

kay, it's a lot easier to mourn the loss of Western culture than the throttling of the two-dimensional bad guy Merriweather Snipes, but Galvin takes the melodrama to an extreme: The "good" guy -- in this case, a murderer -- ultimately faces no social consequence for his law-breaking. True, it's a book about violence and greed, but it justifies almost anything as long as the land is protected. And there's a paper-thin line between passion and rage. The malignant Snipes never breaks the law, he just has values (admittedly reptilian) that collide with Mike Arans's. The West is wild, to be sure, but do we really want to believe that violence in the service of one man's sense of virtue is permissible?

Galvin's "The Meadow" was one of the most beautiful and enchanting books to be written in or about the West in the past 10 years, and is arguably among the three best books about Wyoming ever. "Fencing the Sky" is just the latest in the burgeoning genre of Western literature exploring the delicate relationship between landscape and how it suffers modern human activity. Ivan Doig's "Mountain Time" and Larry McMurtry's memoir, "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," are sturdier explorations of the state of the Western landscape, but neither captures the poetic puzzle of the place as well as Galvin.

This the area where I grew up, after reading one of the reviews felt the need to" speak my piece". Don't read this unless you read The Meadow first. This story isn't about land barons it's about the little guy we all know in the new west the ones who hang on to the dream. It has a wonderful crazy twist that we've seen in many of the true life small ranch owners. Enjoy it for the story with all the twists and turns of a Wyoming creek.

I have a rule, or, rather, a practice of reading paperbacks and, if I find the book to be one that I know I will want to revisit repeatedly, and recommend to friends, I then buy the book in hardcover. When I was about three quarters of the way through Fencing the Sky I went to Amazon and ordered it in hardcover. Last night, when I finished it, I tried to cancel the order.

The author has a rare gift: he is able to make the reader feel the places, know the people, and understand both in a way that draws her or him into the reality of the modern, aging west. There are imperfect heroes and awkward villains, depicted in a way that causes the reader to want to know, to confront, both. All of this wrapped in a story that caused me, at least, to need to see the past that had formed the characters and led to the events that the ending would bring.

Which brings me to the ending, and to the reason I won't keep a hardcover copy of this book. All I'll say is that a character that I had come to know, to understand, and to relate to because of how well the author had captured the spirit, mores, and outlook of real westerners, suddenly and jarringly acts out of character. From there, a poorly constructed ending emerged.

It's worth reading, but it should have been worth buying in hardcover.

A book I will read several times and. Very well written and a scathing take on the "back to nature" lemmings who want to spread all the woes of overpopulation into the very open spaces they yearn to experience. After reading this book I feel that I have a new author to enjoy and am pleased to see that he has written several.

I love westerns but this book went back and forth from present then back when he was in college. When he was on drugs then again back to the present. It was confusing for me to keep track on where the author wanted to go. I wouldn't recommend this book.

I thought this was a non-fiction book and it may be based on real life but, with only about 1/4 of it read, it seems a little slow. For someone wanting just a good story, it would probably be good.