Customer Reviews

Where the Sea Used to Be

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

 

 

Rick Bass has pulled off a masterpiece in his first novel about man or machine versus nature. The story operates on two levels - the contest between four central characters - a sort of King Lear and his daughters, except in this case one daughter and two proteges who are stand-ins for sons, geologists/oil drillers/naturalists. The other level is the backdrop of Big Sky country, Montana. The book is also big, long, and challenging, and sometimes hard to get your mind around. For those who want their stories in small doses and to get to the point fast, this book is not for you. It demands a leisurely pace, which makes even I who am a patient reader sometimes squirm. The only flaw with regard to length are some of the Dudley passages on the formation of the earch, which form a story within a story. A lot of that I think could have been trimmed back. Some if it, and especially, Dudley's personal story is integral to the novel. Yet, you will do yourself a disservice if you skip over the lush and lengthy descriptions of the main story. There is a reason for it. The setting and the characters are intertwined. The setting shapes the characters and the characters shape the setting. Could Bass or someone else have a written a shorter book on the same topic? Probably, but the effect would have been lost. Some say it is pretentious. I disagree. This is a book of magnitude and scale, in other words, an epic and it needs size. To use an overworked metaphor, I believe the story has to brew likely good coffee or decant like fine wine. The story is ultimately satisfying on all levels if you allow it.

I have never known people to moan endlessly in their sleep night after night. Nor, have I ever known people to lose consciousness for weeks at a time in a depressive slumber. And, I have never met a man who would haplessly give up all wordly conveniences to live in a frozen tundra with another man's lover all for an overly possessive boss. O'kay, so maybe I have never been a wolf tracker in Northwest Montana in dead winter or a driven geologist, but still... Rick Bass' novel is an ambitious saga about an uncoventional love triangle, well actually its a square between naturalist daughter, possessive tycoon father, and two (2) young geologists in pursuit of fossil fuel in the remote parts of Montana. The scenery is painted very beautifully by Bass and particularly interesting, is his portrayal of the town casket carver, weaving wonderful metaphors between the animals decorating the tombs and the townspeople for whom they are built. Unfortunately, Bass' rich descriptions of the Montana winter are not nearly as convincing as the psychology that plays out between the characters. We just never really understand what drives these people except perhaps for Old Dudley(the seminal capitalist), whose primal need is to control everything in his grubby path. Mel, Old Dudley's daughter, is portrayed as an eminently rugged woman content to follow her life's work of tracking wolves. However, this same strong willed individual takes in her father's proteges without thought and argument allowing them to complicate her simple life. It just isnt believable. The cold these people endure day in and day out is just not believable. In short, the characters and their lives, are just not believable. Perhaps raw poetry would better suit this author, paint me a rich snowy landscape not an empty protagonist.

As someone obsessed with the mountains and mountain culture, I simply can not get enough of the nature writings of Rick Bass, especially "Where the sea used to be." The geological terminology that peppers the book and the premise of protecting the Yaak from drilling makes the story much more understandable and interesting to me, as a petroleum engineering student. No matter what one's perspective is regarding environmental policy, the attatchment to The Valley that Bass imbeds in every reader is unavoidable.

I read a novella form of "Where the Sea Used to Be" in Bass's "The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness" and I liked the short version better. Where Bass's lyric prose is tight and to the point in his novellas, the novel version of WTSUTB has beautiful descriptive passages but some undeveloped characters. There is little dialogue and page after page of omniscient explanation. It works on some levels, but not on others. The journal entries were written in a tedious, pretentious voice--I think that they ask too much of the reader.

I still want to read everything Bass has written, but for such a long form, he should keep in mind that pace is important too.

For me, the most realistic and enjoyable aspect of this book are the vivid descriptions of the landscape and the seasons. Rick Bass has an impressive familiarity with the natural world. The book is also populated by a number of interesting characters, and the plot is intriguing as well, though not entirely believable. I got distracted (and bored) reading Young Dudley's geology journals, and I just couldn't see a good reason for having it interrupt the narrative. Further distracting are some characters' behaviors which really stretch credulity, particularly over-the-top Dudley and overworked, "soulless" Matthew. I found this book to be alternately enjoyable and irritating. Not sure I'd recommend it.

In reading over the previous reviews, I was astounded to see so many readers criticizing Bass for being too much of a conservationist or asking for the return of Hemingway. This is a novel and should be taken as such. Yes, is does revolve around Bass' love of nature, but Hemingway's novels tended to center around things he was passionate about too. So what about the book itself? It definitely has its occasional flaws, but any of Bass' works should be read slowly and enjoyed for the intimacy that they provide. As a first attempt at a novel, I enjoyed the lengthy depictions that his previous novellas and short stories weren't able to contain due to page restraints. Bass has a lot to say, the length of the book is testimony to this, and it is in the places and people that he describes that this aspect rings most true. This book is more about descriptions than it is about plot. Yes, some may find this a fault, but any reader of Bass will understand that this is simply his style, and he is damn good at it. I recommend this book highly, but be warned, it will take a bit to get into, but it is also worth the effort.

This book will overwhelm you. Fight though it. I have been waiting for years for a novel by Rick Bass. At last, at last.
Read the pans with a grain of salt in your eye. No, that doesn't work, sounds too painful. Don't believe every review you read. Except maybe this one.
This story is a LEGEND. A modern day myth. Of course it is unrealistic. Of course the charecters perform superhuman feats. The age old good vs. evil in the dying wilderness of NW Montana. I have met Old Dudley in the flesh, or at least men like him. They CONSUME you. I'm guessing Mr. Bass has had the same unhappy experience.
All you have learned and expected of Rick Bass are hear for the taking. Glacial prose. You can't hope to slow its advance, just take a breath before it bowls you under. Hibernate and enjoy.

This book captures the spirit of the West! The ups and downs of living in a harsh environment. But beyond that, the characters, the conflicts depicted are both well written and capture the reader. The historical references, the land and the weather, the geography and the sense of place are all living presences in the story. A fine read!

AFTER READING AND LOVING ""NINEMILE WOLVES""---THIS IS
THE THIRD BOOK AFTER THAT THAT I STARTED TO READ. I MADE
IT THRU THE OTHER TWO---BUT---NOT THIS ONE. AFTER 90 PAGES
AND FOUR NAPS---I SKIMMED THE REST OF THE BOOK AND FELL
ASLEEP---AGAIN!!! THIS IS NOT FOR ME. I STOPPED!!!

I've seen reviews that fault Bass for being too sympathetic to leftist environmentalism and too conservative in his approach. This doesn't make him "balanced" any more than it justifies such generalist dismissals.

My issues with this book are more specific. It's simply densely overwritten; at some point after 14 years and thousands of pages, it seems that Bass and three editors either didn't know what to keep and what to cut, or all of them wrote some portion of the thing and threw their parts in like a stew. There are metaphors sustained overtly then exhausted, never to be seen again (one, for instance, of the geologist "burned up or crushed" is used seven times in five pages, then dropped). Dudley's big voice in his journals is both inappropriate to his age at the time and inconsistent with the dim-witted consciousness he exhibits when he appears in the book. Passages of the text are beautiful, poetic, the way Bass often finds a good sentence. But here we have to watch him hack away at twenty bad throws on the wheel before a well-shaped cup comes out. I felt battered by the repeatedly obvious invocation of the primitive and the ancient to define these characters' lives in the hard cold of northern Montana. I know the hard cold of Montana, and Bass gets it right on, but under the hammer of redundancy.

I say all this being, ultimately, on Bass's side about preservation of the wilderness. Except... What, by god, is with the dead animal fetish? Much of Bass's work is an ode to hunting, all arguments on highly questionable bases. He's obsessed with the great white hunter motif in both his fiction and nonfiction of late, and it just doesn't work. If you want to hunt, then do it and shut up. Please don't fly in the face of reason (which is that we really do not need to kill animals to survive; we do it simply because we like it), and then pretend that this is all a spiritual quest for the soul. It's a hundred carcasses in a smokehouse. After a hundred pages I may as well have been reading a more articulate Ted Nugent, which isn't saying much. Bass can't get through a complete scene in the novel without someone lovingly gesturing to a hunk of leftover game.

*Winter* is a great book. *The Ninemile Wolves* is spotty in its logic, but ultimately a terrific thing for Bass to have done, both politically and prosaically. His short stories run the gamut of quality, but demonstrate that he's the real thing as a writer. However, he writes too much, too fast, with a lot of juice but far less wisdom; the novel isn't really a genre forgiving of that mix. And this religious doctrine of the hunt has, sadly, polluted his prose with fundamentalism.