Customer Reviews

BAD LAND. An American Romance.

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is one of my favorite books...it really brought to life for me the odd mix of idealism and severe hardship of our midwestern settlers. Raban's style of story telling is relaxed and detail oriented, but once I'm into it, it has a life of its own....the writing is just incandescent. I could really imagine myself trying to get my family through a minus thirty degree winter with the wind howling through my thin wooden house, and hardly any food in the pantry. It seems that Raban's British sensibilities may have caused some unsatifying stereotyping of Montanans among his readers, but I didn't read this book to get a politically correct viewpoint. I read it because as much as any writer working today, Raban is able to let me experience the situations he is writing about. One of the very few books I have read twice.

The world, it seems, is replete with images of the American West. In the age of film and television you don't have to have been born in the United States to recognise the iconography of long, stretched shadows from sunsets slipping through the buttes and prairieland of Montana or Wyoming or Utah. The book Bad Land by British-born Jonathan Raban, therefore presents nothing new, until, as it does, it scratches at a little of that image, through the dry high-plains dirt and grime to reveal the people behind the landscape; the flesh and lives and stories of individuals who endured the cold, the wind, the loneliness. Raban's exquisite descriptions of the Montana terrane of the late 1800s reflect the almost fruitless attempts of immigrants to tame those wilds. Having lived and worked in Montana I found the portrayal of this region disturbing; not because of its inaccuracies (they fit almost exactly with my memories) but with how little the landscape was really changed by those honyockers (homesteaders).

It is evident that the book was not just researched, it has been lived. Raban over many years travelled from his home in Seattle, Washington to those sand washed prairie beaches of central and eastern Montana. One feels his ghost intermingling with the spirits of last century as he slips in and out of roofless, sundried timber cabins set in the tall, mostly snake filled grasses of abandoned ranches. If there is fault in this book, it is that it sometimes slips too far into the minutiae of the lost lives of people, who we somehow feel, we never or could never have known; these are people so unlike most of us - willing to rush headlong into something we can not fathom. We travel with Raban not only eastward from Seattle but backward in time to view the west through such players as Evelyn Cameron and her amateur, but surprisingly surreal, photographs of the infant west. We walk in the shoes of the displaced and lonely; immigrants who were wooed by flashy railroad pamphlets that were spread all over Europe like so many modern day get-rich schemes. Some things, like the landscape, seem never to change.

Ultimately, bad land is a book about people. And the details of their lives are bought to life by Raban. Perhaps it takes a non-American to see a specialness in seemingly dreary, worn and weather-beaten people and land. For those wanting to know what the American West was and is now like, this book will be more than just a pleasurable read, it will beckon you to travel there and seek yourself.

This very well written book is an excellent expression of how geography, history, and psychology (at an individual and group level) are completely intertwined with each other. The author does a wonderful job of telling the bleak and often heartbreaking stories of the early homesteaders of the Montana badlands. He traces the history of some of these families to the present day and even "follows" some of those who pulled up stakes and moved further west. Throughout the book one continuously senses the overwhelming influence of the vast "great American desert" and how it shaped the lives of the people who tried to make a living farming it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

My only complaint is that a particular 20-30 page section of the book makes extensive reference to photographs which sound as if they would have added a great deal to the reader's experience of the book. Unfortunately, the author is describing HIS experience of looking at the photos - none are included anywhwere in the book - and I found myself wishing I could take a look at them too.

The last rather minor complaint aside, I considered this to be an excellent book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban, is at once informative and poetic, starkly beautiful and bleak, sympathetic yet harsh, heartbreaking yet enjoyable, historic yet immediately relevant, personal yet broadly relevant, regional yet universal, factual yet romantic (even surrealistic). In sum, this book is a masterpiece, and richly deserving of its many awards. If you want to understand the landscape and life of the American west (particularly the Montana/Dakotas area), you should read this book. In fact, if you want to gain a better understanding not just of the west, but of AMERICA (particularly rural America, but also many of the prevailing myths and values which have permeated or at least influenced ALL of America) itself, you should read this book.

Bad Land first and foremost is a book about land. Specifically, BAD land, in many ways. Harsh, unforgiving, stark, cold, lonely, dry. Never enough rain. Or too much at once. An at-best marginal ("semi-arid") land for farming that greedy people (mainly the railroads) used to lure naïve (or desperate, or bored, or restless, or ambitious, or crazy, or idealistic) immigrants to with printed glossy brochures, distributed all over the United States and Europe, translated into German, Russian, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish,etc., and filled with romantic pictures of "free, rich farmland" with such "attractive details, that readers would commit their families and their life savings, sight unseen." And come they did, by the thousands, homesteaders ("honyockers") lured also by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 (passed "after a great deal of lobbying by the railroad companies"), out to make their fortune in what was touted as practically a land flowing with milk and honey. Of course, since this was patently not true, the vast majority of "honyockers" failed, and Raban is a master of describing people's romantic dreams, efforts, and - for most -their ultimate, heartbreaking failure.

But even more than a history, this book is a meditation on humans and their attempt to subdue (or at least coexist with) an uncaring, unforgiving, fickle nature. In a way, this book isn't even really about the American west per se; rather, it is about man - sometimes noble, sometimes greedy, sometimes clever, sometimes stupid, sometimes a loner or misfit, etc. And it is about hopes, dreams, individual lives, ghost towns, ghosts, aesthetics (largely of the vast prairie landscape, dirt, shadows, sunsets, and barbed-wire fences), fantasy, reality, myth-making, faith (blind and otherwise), technology, water, soil, and weather (among many other things). Incredible that Jonathan Raban is able to capture so much in one 358-page book; this was obviously a labor of love, one that Raban immersed himself in, and which you will find yourself immersed in as well!

Raban writes about Montana, and the settlers who came happy but soon left, destitute and disillusioned at the harsh conditions. His comments can apply to the north of the state I live in (South Australia): the mountains and rangelands of the Flinders Ranges. This country was settled in the second half of the last century, on the hope of farming grain and sheep. There were a few years of plenty, then drought forced humans to re-think and retreat. Today the area is renowned for its natural beauty, but has the feel of an empty landscape, and the visitor wonders why. Plenty of local books describe the Flinders today, but it was not until I had read "Bad Land" that I had some understanding of the hopes of settlers, the intense persuasion to go, the reality, and why they decided to leave. Why is "Bad Land" an important book? Much is written about progress, and to-day people think that anything can be done. It is good to be reminded occasionally that there are places where enthusiasm, hard work, the latest technology, abundant finance, and even large amounts of land are not enough to make a go of it, and that humans are still for all their ideas about themselves subject to the forces of the natural world. The book reminds me of "Into thin air", which described a disastrous expedition to climb MtEverest, with many climbers killed by a storm near the summit. The mountaineers placed hope and faith in their technology and expeience, but forgot or were blind to their own frailty. It is interesting that the two books both came out at around the same time.

"Bad Land" is a captivating account of the great con perpetrated by the USA government and big business, working in cahoots, primarily against emigrants from Britain and Europe who were deceived by the prospect held out to them of a new life in eastern Montana as homesteaders farming free, fertile land. The reality was that the new railways running through the dry prairies of eastern Montana depended on passengers and freight for survival and this required the land to be populated and worked. The stark truth was that the promised land was dry and dusty, with little rainfall - land you couldn't grow a toenail on, totally unsuitable for farming. Unbeknown to the emigrants, they would end up owning "all the dust, rock and parched grass you could see, and more." Thousands of attractive, glossy brochures were distributed far and wide across the USA and Europe promoting the golden dream of riches and prosperity as being there for the taking, just waiting to be snapped up. James J. Hill, the notorious railway magnate, lauded the homesteader scheme as "opening the vaults of a treasury and bidding each man help himself." People were so taken in by the prospect of riches in the new world dangled before them in glossy "golden" presentations and pictures that they were prepared to uproot their lives and their families and risk their lot on "a landscape in a book." They had no conception of what they were letting themselves in for.

Raban is at his best re-creating the great adventure west to eastern Montana, his imagery of that vast, forbidding terrain capturing the landscape in all its moods. He recaptures the arrival of the emigrants by train, taking us into their lives as they try to live out their dream, building their homesteads, fencing their land, borrowing to fund the buying of stock, seed and gasoline tractors and struggling to farm their barren land. Raban brings to life the difficult years that followed the early optimism, reliving how the homesteaders - against the odds of the raking northwind, the cold of Montana "like a boot in the face", the dust, the dry land, the drought years, the dying cattle, the swarms of grasshoppers ("For every hopper killed it seemed like an entire family came to the funeral") - battled in vain to build a fragile, ordered world only to see it crumble rapidly around them within the space of a decade or so. Defeated, most homesteaders quit in the period 1917-1928 and headed further west. It was like coming out of a bad dream. Their bible, "Campbell's soil culture manual", the bestselling guide to husbanding dry land had proved to be a piece of absolute twaddle but too late, did the truth finally dawn that it was the "half-baked theory of a pseudo-scientific crank."

By the 90's, when Raban visited eastern Montana, the homesteads were reverting back to nature: odd fenceposts, rusty harrows and derelict houses the only visible remnants of the homesteaders' hopes and dreams. "Bad Land" could, and should have been, a pure, undiluted five star classic account of the homesteader's tragic experience and for the most part it is but it occasionally, irritatingly, strays into unnecessary technical detail and lengthy digressions on, for example, "Campbell's Soil Culture Manual", Photography, and Ismay's attempt to re-invent itself under the new name of "Joe" (Montana), rather than remaining firmly yoked to the central theme of the homesteader's tragic experience - the last part of the book is a further illustration of this kind of distraction. Still recommended though!

Raban's such a good writer, I suppose I'd like any book he wrote (I'm going to find out shortly by getting hold of another). And that is the only reason I liked this book since the subject matter -- settlement of the Northern Plains around 1911 - 1920 -- does not, in itself, compel me. But then again, I didn't know much about it, and Raban very nicely introduced us. So many interesting things . . . how the drawing of the North Dakota / Montana state line around the 104th meridian split these otherwise similarly-sited people and diluted their political power; how the initial "wet years" of 1911 - 1914 gave such false hope, leading to such disillusionment, and eventually further emmigration west, as the "dry years" ensued and blew away their topsoil with their dreams; how they didn't wander into the area, but rather, were seduced into it by the railroads' (read JP Hill's) misrepresentation of the climate and land, the ease of "firming up" one's rather large homestead claim (hundreds of acres for a song), and the new "scientific" method of "dry farming" which promised to re-create the arcadia these settlers remembered from Europe. And I never thought much about hard it would be to build miles of barbed-wire-and-wood-post fences in a land without trees.

Raban argues that this suckering of the little people by the railroads/federal government accounts for the fierce anti-federalism of the seemingly-many up in that area today; that the memory has passed through the generations. So many other memories and ways of life have perservered there on the ranches and such, he may be right.

As to Paul Theroux, Raban says they have been friends for "decades." Raban's writing here is similar to Theroux's in the ironic and honest observations that help propel the narrative. But Raban never says anything like, "I felt like throwing the little old lady off the train."

"Bad Land" is about how intrepid European immigrants were lured to Eastern Montana at the beginning of the 20th century with the promise of owning land and, limited only by their hard work and ability to follow new-fangled "scientific" farming methods, living the American dream. Unfortunately, the unfertile soil, no matter how vigorously tilled, could not yield all that much, and the conditions were brutal. Still these souls perservered, until desperation drove them out.

What I liked most about Raban's book was the description of the harsh lives that these people had to endure on a daily basis. The farming methods that they scrupulously obeyed turned out to be completely bogus. As 21st century Americans leading, for the most part, comfortable lives (although let's never forget about the victims of Hurricane Katrina) it is almost inconceivable what these men, women and children experienced year after year.

And yet, I can't help but wonder about the ancestors of these would-be farmers. Something tells me that their subsequent generations (perhaps the grandchildren) somehow found their footing in other endeavors, and did quite well. Perhaps I'm being idealistic, but I have to believe that the work ethic of these immigrants eventually paid off in future generations.

I highly recommend "Bad Land," as a description of a time and place in the U.S.A. which you probably will not learn about anywhere else.

I want to than Jonathan Raban for this gift. I am 4th generation Eastern Montana and this is the most accurate portrait of this area I have read. As an outsider, he thought to describe things I had taken for granted as normal. It was fascinating to understand from an outsider, what this culture is like and what sort of reaction a visitor would have. His curiosity and openness are a delight, his humor dry. His descriptions of the country and culture that are my own were close and truthful. I benefited much from this reading in that I have come to understand more of what defines the culture I was raised in, and the awsome differences between that culture and the rest of the US. The book is of great value to anyone who knows the area of Eastern Montana that Raban describes. It is more important to the rest of the population. We live in a Nation that is quickly becoming without local identity. There are few cultures that have survived these changes. There is a need for us to know that there is an alternative to the materialistic shallowness and sameness of urban America. There is no GAP on the HiLine.

"Bad Land" is a compelling work of cultural and social history, culling stories from the lost northern midlands of America. Raban reclaims these stories as they pass like whispers on the cold winds sweeping the open prairie of eastern Montana. The rambling and eclectic topical sweep of the book, of which other reviewers have complained, in fact contributes to the integrity of Raban's attempt to reconstruct a lost history. He is not some Dean of the West, speaking from the high pulpit of academic authority. He is a writer who has become interested in the stories of people who are in many ways exemplars and co-creators of the American mythos. He finds echoes of his own experience as an emigrant in the stories of those who left their homes to pursue a dream of independence and self-sufficiency. And as he compiles his stories and tours with an eager eye around this oft-forgotten landscape, he glimpses those beautiful truths about the Human Condition that are like gold nuggets in the river of life for a philosopher and lover of knowledge. Raban conducts his narrative with candor, and the book has a resulting intimacy that makes it the perfect antidote to the inept and barren reams of college textbook lore about the westward expansion and the Homestead Act. Raban returns several times to the question of space vs. place - seeing how generations of dreamers had turned the apparent empty spaces of the plains into the fertile utopias of their dreams. Raban gives to the empty space of the plains the real faces of those who tried to make a home there as homesteaders, as well as those who still do live there - persisting in various ways in that hard hard land.

Perhaps the more subtle merit of this book is that it is not easily classified. It is part ghostly journalism, part historical reconstruction, and part travel narrative. As a work of history it remains elusive and delightfully complex. We learn about fluctuations in the price of wheat, the cunning rhetoric of early railroad pamphleteers, the contents of an early homestead, the logistics of dry-land farming, the social organization and relations of homesteaders, the dictates of nature in the unforgiving north, and the various personalities that stood out in a time of great change in the American landscape. Raban's writing is an inspired meditation on the scattered remnants of our cultural past, and how they can be assembled into an elegant understanding of who we are and from where we have come.