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The brave cowboy: An old tale in a new time (A Zia book)

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It was one of Edward Abbey's regrets that he was appreciated more for his nature writing ("Desert Solitaire") than his fiction. And it was another regret that he was mostly forgotten as the author of the story on which the movie "Lonely are the Brave" was based. However, after reading "The Brave Cowboy," I'd have to vote with those who find his nonfiction far more inspiring and satisfying. It's a novel that still rewards the reading, but almost 50 years after its publication in 1956, it seems somewhat dated, while "Desert Solitaire" remains as fresh and relevant as if it were written yesterday.

Abbey was still in his twenties when he wrote this novel, and its point of view is that of a young man full contradictory passions and attitudes. The brave cowboy of the title, a prototypical figure on horseback, is the central character in maybe half the pages of the novel. A younger college friend, imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft, is another character. The local sheriff gets a large section to himself. The novel also follows the progress of a long-haul truck driver across the country. The lives of these four characters intersect in the narrative, while each of them also represents a different perspective. And they don't all quite converge in a single point of view. But that was Abbey, an outspoken man who wasn't afraid to contradict himself.

To its credit, the novel can be read on more than one level. It uses the cowboy to represent free-spirited, libertarian ideas set in conflict with brute ignorance and repression. It decries urbanization and celebrates the limitless, stark beauty of the mountains and desert (the novel is set in northern New Mexico). It's also a prison drama, and it tells a satirical yet gripping story of heavily armed but mostly inept law officers in pursuit of a fugitive. A reader interested in a 1950s view of the West and its people in post-war transition will find much to enjoy in Abbey's youthful book about a mythic cowboy's adventure and the lives it disrupts.

As a companion volume, I'd also recommend James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky," which tells a similar story about a cowboy pursued across a Western landscape by the law.

When Jack Burns encounters a barbed-wire fence as he comes across the West Mesa (Albuquerque)on horseback he scans in both directions for a gate before he clips the wire to ride through. He wouldn't have cut it if it wasn't in his way, or if there'd been a gate nearby. Thus begins the book with a scene that tells much about the main character.

Burns is a man who doesn't merely cling to ideals of loyalty, privacy and individual freedom. His internal machinery accepts no alternative at any level. Jack Burns is a man who won't cut a fence unless it stands in the way of where he wants to go. He recognizes the existence of the creeping encroachments and compromises to his choices and ignores them. The modern acquiescence by the rest of society is foreign to him.

Burns descends the mesa into Albuquerque, encounters modern city life and is battered by it without 'losing' in the usual sense of the word, and leaves on the run from the legal instruments intended to keep us all on the straight and narrow. The end is inevitable.

Readers who know Albuquerque will enjoy the ride across the 'Volcans', the places in the Rio Grande Valley still recognizable despite the years since Abbey wrote the book, the harrowing climb up the Sandias pursued by the military and law enforcement community. Those who don't know Albuquerque or New Mexico will appreciate the type of individual Burns portrays: a man born too late, unable to compromise.

I haven't seen the movie mentioned by other reviewers. I also didn't see the shortcomings of the book mentioned by several. I saw only a writer who created a character much as Abbey saw himself, as many people today see themselves, and a plot that carried those traits through to the end. No one, I imagine Abbey would say, can dodge the steamroller.

Edward Abbey's first published novel is a modern-day western set in New Mexico. Its hero, Jack Burns, is a man unable to come to terms with an increasingly civilized west, who becomes a fugitive from the law after he attempts to help his friend break out of jail. Hunted by the authorities, he complicates his escape by refusing to leave his skittish horse behind. Despite the awful title, it is a well-written, entertaining novel that explores the tension between personal freedom and modern civilization against a backdrop of stark natural beauty. Made into an even better film under the title Lonely Are the Brave. Coincidentally, I read this book after finishing Rand Johnson's excellent new novel "Arcadia Falls", which tho set in the suburban east, is thematically very similar.

This is a novel about a man born into the wrong era. Jack Burns is a cowboy through and through--unaccustomed to having his freedom restricted and driven by a strong sense of loyalty and honor. The problem is he lives in post World War II America, and his old-fashioned values and desire to roam the country freely often clash with the modern society in which he lives. This causes many problems for Burns, some simple, some complicated: he has a hard time getting his horse to cross the highway, people don't respect him, he doesn't register for the draft (which was compulsory then). He is put in jail trying to help a friend, and it is here that the conflict of old and new really begins to unfold.

Without revealing too much of the plot, Burns tries to beat modern society with his old-fashioned ways. The final section of the book deals with the physical conflict between old and new, between horse and horsepower, and it is clear that Jack Burns simply does not belong in the era into which he was born. This novel details the struggle for disappearing values, the desperate attempt to hold on to the past (and the consequences this sometimes brings). Edward Abbey is an excellent writer, and his prose is vivid and descriptive. The Brave Cowboy is a classic work of American Western fiction.

Q: What's your occupation? A: Cowhand, sheepherder; game poacher.

Q: Where's your papers?...Your I.D.--draft card, social security, driver's license? A: Don't have none. Don't need none. I already know who I am.

Edward Abbey is one of the patron saints of the modern Environmental movement; right up there with Rachel Carson. Desert Solitaire, his memoir of working in a National Park, is an impassioned statement of preservationist principles and his comic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is a virtual primer for ecoterrorism. But my personal favorite of his books is the little remembered Brave Cowboy, the basis for the excellent but equally forgotten Kirk Douglas film, Lonely Are the Brave. It belongs on the shelf with the other uniquely American paens to independence and rugged individualism: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest(read Orrin's review), Cool Hand Luke, From Here to Eternity (read Orrin's review), All the Pretty Horses (read Orrin's review), etc.

Set in the mid 1950's, the novel tells the story of Jack Burns, a latter day cowboy, now reduced to working as a hand on a sheep ranch, who gets himself thrown into prison so that he can help his draft dodging friend escape. But when his buddy refuses to compromise the moral purity of his concientious objector status, Burns is forced to break out on his own, assuming that a vicious Mexican prison guard he has aggravated doesn't kill him first. In the meantime the authorities have realized that Jack too is unregistered and that while they were in college together, he helped his friend with some radical causes, however ineffectual. So when he does manage to escape, Jack ends up being treated as a dangerous fugitive, instead of as the fairly harmless eccentric that he is. Pursued by locals, feds, the military and the sadistic guard, he takes off into the desert, his only allies a high spirited horse, who's as much trouble as help, and a phlegmatic local sherriff named Morlin Johnson.

In a broader sense though, what the book is really about is the clash between the values of the old West and the bureaucratic, mechanized, regimented and federalized modern West. Though it lacks the memorable set-pieces that distinguish the other books cited above and is admittedly none too subtle in portraying the menace of modern life, it succeeds nonetheless because the character of Jack Burns evokes such nostalgia in the reader and like Don Quixote, we find the mental world that he lives in more attractive than the reality that has begun to crowd in on him. I like the novel very much and especially recommend the movie.

GRADE: B+

Edward Abbey's first-best book is, of course, "Desert Solitaire," that fictionalized non-fiction work that so eloquently celebrates the pristine Southwest wilderness and mourns its destruction at the hands of industry and politics.

"The Brave Cowboy" is known to many through its filmization with Kirk Douglas. Despite the inane title, "Lonely Are the Brave," it is an excellent movie. But the book is even more excellent.

If you see this work purely as social commentary -- the individual at odds with society -- you miss the point. That aspect of the book, while it is an impassioned message from one of this country's best nature writers, is almost too obvious to deserve mention. The message -- and the beautifully detailed setting of Western plains and mountains -- is the background.

The foreground is a character study of Jack Burns, a man in perpetual rebellion against authority and incapable of commitment to anything outside of himself. He is generous and caring, but he allows no one to penetrate his stubborn exterior. He refuses to be vulnerable to love or to any of the normal compromises that permit even the most hardened of us individualists to survive in the real world.

He is inevitably doomed by his own intransigence, and that is what makes the story more than just "sad": it is a genuine tragedy. And like all successful tragedies, it is uplifting. The book's triumph is that, even while we know the outcome, we envy Jack Burns.

This book is a youthful work. You won't find a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald in the writing style, or even a Jack London. It is a popular book, more like a best-seller than "literature." Nevertheless, the excellence of its story raises it above the main. It is simply a great, and greatly affecting, read.

If you're a fan of Ed Abbey, you really ought to read this book. It's not his best work, because his views are presented with a very thin plot. The image of the cowboy riding down the freeway was lovely, however and it doesn't feel too preachy. I would recommend Monkey Wrench Gang or Desert Solitaire to anyone just breaking into Abbey's work. They're simply better peices and frankly, they appear to have been written for a more educated audience than Brave Cowboy.

Brave Cowboy is a quick, easy read that will entertain you and will help clarify Abbey's views on freedom, men and women. It's unlikely you'll agree with him, but the subtext of the book will make you think more than the plot itself.

I liked Edward Abbey long before I read his work as I saw the movie adaptation of this book "Lonely Are The Brave" back in the Sixties. Abbey’s protagonist, Jack Burns, the uncompromising rebel from another America, is as free spirited as his creator. Constantly at odds with modern life, he eventally violates enough of its ways to become sought by the law. Hunted relentlessly he chooses to stay with his horse and chance his escape across rugged mountains rather than abandoning him and fleeing on foot.... Burns is not your typical cowboy hero; he is a reminder that the individual is sometimes far grander than the shackles he creates by the imposed rules of society.

For those who weren't lucky to have read Abbey chronologically, I'm afraid there are layers that you have missed. (The cowboy for instance.) All advance climbing necessary to reach comfortable rock to lean against while reading "Fool's Progress". Since "Jonathan Troy" is long out of print, fried salted mutton and beans over juniper coals at dawn is not a bad place to begin. Abbey, in this story, dives into the great and growing conflict between the wilderness and the coming of the machine, the struggle of those living between the reality and the romance. Or maybe just two realities. Abbey's comment back in the early 50"s on big brother and the BS rings true today.

This book has been in my bookcase for sometime and I am not clear where it came from. Perhaps a Christmas present. Perhaps an impulse purchase as I enjoy this author, even though we are politically poles apart.

Regardless, I noticed it a few days ago and started reading it and was once again immersed in Edward Abbey's view of life from fifty-two years ago.

Jack Burn's and Paul Bondi are friends that go way back although they have drifted apart. Burn's rides back into the Bondi's life on the back of a fractious young horse he has named Whiskey only to find that his friend is in the County Jail awaiting transfer to a federal penitentary for failing to register for the draft.

Burns has an idea that if he can get into the jail, he can break his friend out and they can though go live in the mountains until the law gets tired of looking for them. He manages to get himself arrested and it looks as though his screwball plan may in fact work...except Bondi will have no part of it. He has two years to serve and a wife and child to return to. His days of protesting and supporting anarchy are over.

Burns and a couple of others manage the escape and part their seperate ways. It has come to the attention of the authorities that Burns, like Bondi has protested the Draft Registration Law and are interested in interrogating him. But first they have to find him.

The balance of the book is taken over with the search for Burns by the authorities which allows Abbey to trot out many of his political views in an entertaining way in the point and counterpoint action between the hunters and the hunted.

Even fifty-six years after it's original publication this is a book still worth reading notwithstanding the preface that Abbey writes:

"This is only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truckdriver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was."

Right. Only a story. But, there are stories, and there are stories. This is one you will remember.