Customer Reviews

Shane

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

The film version of Jack Schaefer's 1949 novel "Shane" is one of those touchstone movies of childhood, along the lines of the unforgettable tearjerker "Old Yeller." The last scenes of the film are sure to bring a lump to the throat of the most stalwart among us. With memories of the film firmly etched in my mind, I decided to read Schaefer's novel, to go to the source itself and see whether the book is better than the movie. I have to say Shane as a novel is a must read, even more important than watching the film version.

The plot should be familiar to many people. The Starrett family is working some land in Wyoming, trying to cut a living out of the rugged landscape. Several other families are staking claims in the area even though Fletcher, the big rancher in the region, hates their presence and is working behind the scenes to drive them out. The homesteaders look to Joe Starrett to protect their interests in the face of this intimidation, a battle Joe is slowly losing until the arrival of Shane.

When Shane arrives, he quickly takes up residence with the Starrett family, working as a hand around the place. Within a short period of time Shane finds himself sucked into the feud between Fletcher and the homesteaders. Ranch hands goad Shane into several violent fistfights, although Shane goes out of his way to avoid trouble. As the level of conflict escalates and the dangerous qualities of Shane emerge, Fletcher brings in a hired gun from the outside to deal with the troublesome homesteaders for the last time. The final scenes of the novel balance gripping action with the heartrending departure of Shane back into the wilderness from which he came.

Schaefer pulls off a triumph of epic proportions with this short novel. Not only is the story told in a sparse, no nonsense style, Schaefer makes Joe Starrett's son Bob the narrator of the story. Through this touchingly innocent narration, Bob manages to convey the mysterious qualities of Shane while still revealing adult themes. For example, a rather platonic love emerges between Shane and Marion, Bob's mother. Joe knows about the love springing up between the two but chooses to keep it in perspective. The beauty of this incident is how Bob relates it; he discusses it just as a child would, without really understanding the implications of the situation while the reader understands perfectly what is happening. Brilliant, just brilliant!

Shane is the main character of the novel even though we do not learn much about him. Shane is an enigma clad in dark clothing, riding in off the land like some mysterious omen of doom. Schaefer tells us nothing about Shane's past, although it is obvious he is a master with a pistol and that he has a checkered past involving trouble of some sort. Whatever trouble Shane is in, he is what we would call "good people." Shane wants to avoid conflict, but he will never back down from a fight or fail to help people who treat him as a friend. His past haunts his actions, making him reluctant to rely on his seemingly vast reservoirs of strength. When pushed to the wall, Shane lashes out with a terrible violence usually kept in check because he knows what he is capable of doing to a man.

There are several themes arcing their way through this book. One deals with fate and how it is impossible to escape your past. Another involves violence; not reckless violence of the type employed by Fletcher and his goons, but a measured violence used to solve a seemingly insolvable situation. Schaefer shows us that no matter what our intentions in this life, there are going to be times when violence in the name of a cause is the only answer to those who are incapable of relying on any method other than intimidation to get what they want out of life.

This is an excellent read for any type of reader both young and old, although that does not make it a necessarily easy book. The bare bones writing style makes it very easy to gloss over important themes and symbolisms. In other words, "Shane" is a book to think about both when reading it and after finishing the story. Reading the story more than once may not be a bad idea, as more themes are sure to emerge from this fascinating character study. Schaefer dedicated "Shane," his first book, to his first son. What a beautiful and wondrous tribute.

I'm a 7th grader who just finished writing this review for my class and my teacher accused me of cheating. She said it was too good for a 7th grader to write. My mother suggested that I send my review in and consider it a vote of confidence. This action-filled western fiction, set in the late 1880's has an unpredictable ending. When a restless gunman rides into a hard working, god-fearing family, they provide him with honest work and stability. The untouchable gunman changes his negative actions into positive actions by fighting for justice of the commom man in a Wyoming valley of corrupted cattlemen. The setting provided a historic look into the past of the taming of the west and its enduring bloodshed of the ending of open ranges and the beginning of grazing wars between the farming homesteaders and the established ranchers. The main character's defenses of isolation and destitute unravel into a caring, justice-seeking, loyal man whose attributes contribrute to the small homesteading community. Finding his acceptance among man, the main character, unpredictably returns to his engraved dynamics of aloneness and shatters the lives of the people who grew so close to him. This novel impressed upon my mind the cliche'"The road to heaven is paved with good intentions", showing me that he couldn't distance his past and feel comfortable in his own skin where ever he roamed. SHANE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO CHANGE A NEGATIVE TO A POSITIVE-BUT I SURE CAN! JESSE MILLER

Unlike the reviewer "Barb from Oregon," I believe everything she found detestable in Shane is what makes it a great western. Her firts complaint was to the shallow development of the Shane character. I believe the author intentionally left his past dim, his motivations unkown, as part of the "hero" motif. As to violence--it's a western story depicting a range war, not a court proceeding. The author shows Joe's muscles ripping his shirt in the bar fight for a reason. From the perspective of his son, it was vitally important that he see his father as strong, otherwise his admiration of Shane may have overshadowed his father.

Wild Bill recommends this book for any reader interested in a portrayal of the wild west in its legendary form.

He was clean-shaven and his face was lean and hard and burned from high forehead to firm,
tapering chin. His eyes seemed hooded in the shadow of the hat's brim. He came closer, and I
could see that this was because the brows were drawn in a frown of fixed and habitual alertness.
Beneath them the eyes were endlessly searching from side to side and forward, checking off every
item in view, missing nothing. As I noticed this, a sudden chill, I could not have told why, struck
through me there in the warm and open sun.

Well, we all know why that chill ran through little Bob as Shane rode up to the Starrett homestead in the Wyoming Territory in the summer of 1889, because Shane was a lethal, albeit reluctant, gunslinger. This slender American classic tells the story, familiar to every cultured American from the great George Stevens' movie (1953), of how Shane, fleeing a mysterious but obviously violent past, was befriended by the Starretts and stayed on to help them fight off the predatory intentions of the valley's big rancher and his evil henchmen. It is a story that is central to the American mythos.

The great Westerns penetrate deep within the American psyche; they strike a chord that lies somewhere within our national character, just waiting to be plucked. I believe that their unique power derives from a truly elemental facet of democracy--that in order for men to enjoy the freedom that a democracy allows, they must be able to depend on the fundamental goodness of their fellow men. An unyielding, self enforcing morality is a prerequisite for a political system based on liberty; men are unwilling to limit the coercive power of government when they live in fear of one another.

Certainly the Western and the code of the West represent a sanitized and romanticized view of the Frontier and the men who tamed it, but it is a romance that serves the democratic purpose. These morality tales are instructive and aspirational. Of course men like Shane are archetypes in a kind of a national myth making:

There were sharp hidden hardnesses in him. But these were not for us. He was dangerous as
mother had said. But not to us as father too had said. And he was no longer a stranger. He was a
man like a father in whom a boy could believe in the simple knowing that what was beyond
comprehension was still clean and solid and right.

This is a little boy's impossible view of a hero, but here we see that the character of Joe Starrett is equally important. Joe Starrett is a simple sod farmer, but he is kind and decent and honest and courageous, the equal of Shane in every respect except for speed on the draw. Joe is the true yeoman hero of this tale and one of the duties that Shane performs is to demonstrate this fact to young Bob (and to us).

Stories like Shane are a product of a time when Americans genuinely believed in democratic ideals and in the American Dream. They express our native confidence that we can produce men who will measure up these standards. It is no coincidence that the Western died in the mid-60's along with the sense of confidence in our national purpose. It is also unsurprising that it was Ronald Reagan, that hero of myriad Westerns, who stanched the bleeding and made people believe again, however briefly.

Here is just one other example of the instructive nature of these stories. This is Shane, teaching Bob to shoot:

"Listen, Bob. A gun is just a tool. No better and no worse than any other tool, a shovel--or an axe
or a saddle or a stove or anything. Think of it always that way. A gun is as good--and as bad--as
the man who carries it. Remember that."

Think of the level of personal responsibility that this attitude assumes. Contrast it with the near fascist drive to abolish gun rights today. The underlying argument of the forces of gun control is that guns are evil in and of themselves, regardless of the men who wield them. This is part and parcel of the Democrat myth of the '90s. Which do you think is more likely to foster good citizenship, holding guns responsible for violence or holding men responsible?

As for me, I choose the classic Westerns and the democratic ideals that they convey, over the moral relativism that permeates our current culture.

GRADE: A+

Folks, I'm James Drury, who you might remember as television's THE VIRGINIAN, and once in a while I read a book that just has to be read over and over and over. Shane was such a book. The fact that there could be any rating in this section other than a 5 simply astounds me. People keep talking about this stump in the book like the book was about the stump. If you think the book was "about a stump" you are too young to be reading beyond grade school level. Jack Schaefer had a hugely powerful grasp of the West and of Western characters, and he left us a legacy with this book that can never be topped. That's coming from a man who reads Kirby Jonas's novels on audio tape. I enjoy Kirby Jonas's books to no end, and I know of no better author, but Jack Schaefer's "SHANE" is a book for anyone to strive to match. It is an all-time classic that I would put hand in hand with Kirby Jonas's DEATH OF AN EAGLE. It's a shame anyone ever has to feel like they're "forced" to read such a tremendous book as Shane.

I really like this book. I just finished reading it in my 7th grade English class. It has a lot of symbols and quotes that are often difficult to decipher, so I would recommend reading and then discussing it with an adult or in a book club or something. It really gave me an appreciation for great writing with all the symbols and literary devices. I usually hate all assigned school reading, but not SHANE! It's a great book but I wouldn't read it unless you are very good with reading comprehension or are over the age of 14.

Most of us know "Shane" from the excellent movie that remains a high-water mark of realistic depiction of the Old West. Better than the novel could, the movie conveys the dust and grime, the slower pace of events, the backbreaking work of a kind no one in America knows anymore -- and the ways confrontations were handled before the arrival of law and order.

Commonly a book excels its movie, and this one is no exception. The story proceeds as a brewing range war between a Wyoming rancher and small farmers toward the end of the 19th Century. Ironically, in the never-ending struggle between "the old ways" and modernization, the small farmer here represents modernization - and small farmers themselves no longer exist.

The principal characters embody themes as old as literature. Before farmers ever got there, the rancher Fletcher cleared the range of marauding Indians by whatever means worked. In a might-makes-right situation, it probably needed such men to lead the westward migration. Fletcher certainly considers himself wronged as farmers begin taking over the land for which he put his life on the line. That the law favors them doesn't matter; Fletcher respects force and little else.

Joe Starrett emblemizes the civilizing virtues: energy, intelligence, sense of community and honor, moral and physical courage, self-discipline, belief in family and self. In a later Schaefer novel Starrett reappears as Chet Rollins. His very physique - large, awkward, physically powerful - stands as a bulwark to which his fellow farmers repair for advice and leadership. Especially in lawless circumstances, such men represent the institutions of civilization to the less sturdy.

Shane is many things, all of them complex. The book cover caricatures him as a gunfighter who can't escape his past. Shane is more than that; he's a white knight, his life echoing the Greeks who said that character is destiny. A man of substance who disdains the company of most, Shane honors substance in the Starretts. They take to each other immediately.

But Shane has another side that he keeps on a leash: the inner leopard, the big cat that lives and hunts alone, striking fear in those around him. "Bad ones like him are poison," Starrett observes. Shane unhesitatingly takes on hugely uneven odds against Morgan and his gang in the saloon, and it isn't just, or even particularly, courage or heroism. He instinctively relishes combat, violent action, dominance, perhaps even cruelty. The leopard blood passion -- and control of it - occupy Shane's core. He cannot be imagined without both.

Shane brings to mind another hero who entered American consciousness 13 years before this book appeared: Rhett Butler. Rhett has more rebellion in him, but shares with Shane an unerring sense of himself and the milieu in which he moves. Both manifest extraordinary physical ability and competence. As Rhett truly respects only Melanie Wilkes, so Shane only truly respects Joe and Marian Starrett. Neither man feels threatened at knowing "women's stuff" such as ladies' hat styles. Both understand the crucial importance of role models to kids. We know more of Rhett than of Shane, but we do know that Shane somehow let himself down in the past, as Rhett before joining the fight against the North.

At a deep level, this story concerns free will and its consequences. It deals with the choices men make and how the con-sequences of these condition further choosing. Men are tested constantly, and must constantly choose the moral tenor of their response. A man who yields to cowardice, in the many ways that can be done, does irremediable violence to his soul. Once done, it can't be undone and he can't be who he was. Good men have always known this; it's why honor matters, projecting their sense of themselves as moral agents. What others think also matters, but secondarily to their self-opinion.

This theme bears directly on another, that of heroes: what a hero looks like in real life and how he affects others. Schaefer doesn't want us to miss this, so he provides a stark contrast with Shane in the person of Stark Wilson, a man with whom Shane has a great deal in common. Wilson, too, is a leopard. But while Shane puts his leopard passion in the service of principle, Wilson indulges his passion. With jungle mentality, he lives for the kill. These men made different choices along the way, and those choices conditioned all that followed. One can imagine Shane degenerating morally into a Wilson, but cannot imagine Wilson, all moral decay and depravity, evolving into a Shane.

Hence Schaefer, perhaps without realizing it, posits morality as evolutionarily selected. Yet neither Shane nor Wilson marry, and indeed one can't imagine either of them domesticated. They are curiously sexless. But Shane will have progeny in the persons of those who idolize and model on him. Wilson's blatant evil drives others away. He lives solely for himself, so much so that he has nothing to give anyone. His role in the world is to serve as a bad example.

Six years before this book appeared, Ayn Rand brought out one of the great novels on the theme of heroes. The Fountainhead explicates the philosophical issues, but lacks the balance and realism of Shane. In Rand's pantheon, Shane would fit right in while Joe Starrett would barely merit mention. Her heroes never have children, the reason FOR civilization. Yet in everyday living we seldom encounter a Shane while running into Joe Starretts often. Starrett is the enduring hero who has much more to lose (hence to win) than Shane does. Shane is Michael Jordan, magnificent in action, stirring and memorable, the apotheosis of excellence, showing what's possible. But that level of excellence is physically beyond most of us. It's for admiring rather than emulating.

The day-to-day heroes matter more. Joe Starrett needs Shane, but everyone else needs Joe Starrett. Shane knows this. His role is to step in as needed and then, work done, to move on. As he does in this interesting and most excellent short novel.

This remains my favorite book, and I've read thousands, literally, over the years, including some pretty sophisticated stuff (I have an M.A. in American History from Columbia). I saw the movie when it first came out. I was a New York City area kid then, and I fell in love with the Tetons where it was filmed. I then bought the book and loved it. I was captured very early by the scene involving Shane and Joe Starrett and Ledyard, the phony salesman. When Ledyard asks Starrett how he can take the word of a stranger, Shane, Starrett responds: "I can figure men for myself. I'll take his word on anything he wants to say any day of God's whole year." I still get chills re-reading those words; I still strive to live so others might say that of me. Can there be any higher praise? So... read it, and give it to your kids. If you have brought them up right, Shane will become one of their heroes and perhaps they will "grow strong and straight" as Shane wishes for young Joey Starrett in the book.

Set against the backdrop of the westward expansion movement in US history, this novel is almost allegorical in nature. The characters play out their roles in a story as old as time; one of choice, the power of good and evil, and making one's own way in the world. Young Bob must learn that with every conscious decision, comes an element of responsibility. This responsibility is not only to oneself, but also to those who depend on and surround the decision maker. Shane is a man who has learned to live with the results of his decisions; Joe is a good, solid man, a good father and great role model. And Bob's mother, Marian, makes a serious decision as well, regarding her own life, and how she chooses to live it. On the surface, this is a story of ranchers v. cattlemen, but symbolically, it is more a story of choices, of love, and of self-reliance. Good book. I teach it often to my students, and they have always enjoyed it.

This tale of the mysterious stranger who rides in from the distant hills and rides off again, in the end, is mythic archetype of the first order. Shane, unknown and brooding, finds a place for himself at a little farmstead where he is befriended by the farmer's young son, trying desperately to shed his past and make a new and simpler life for himself among the good homesteaders who surround him. But the scheming cattle barons in the area, who control the town and seek to drive the homesteaders out make this impossible. The farmer and his wife who have befriended Shane are already being sucked into a confrontation, not of their own making, in which they must give up everything they have and flee their valley, along with their kind, or stand and fight and be destroyed by the cattlemen who want to keep the range free, at whatever the cost. Shane, the mystery man, tries to help the farmers stand up to the cowboy bullies sent by the ranchers but matters get out of hand when the head rancher, frustrated by Shane's presence and backbone, calls in a ruthless gunman from nearby Cheyenne to bring matters to a head. But Shane is more than what he seems as our little boy narrator and the cattle barons and the farmer and his wife soon find out and the tale culminates in a final confrontation which is emotionally powerful as strong men face one another in a battle for justice and right. A great, if rather short, tale, the epitome of the Old West. I loved this book and the movie that came after it. By the way, Clint Eastwood's film, Pale Rider, is another re-make, albeit with some variations, of this very wonderful novel.

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga