Monday, February 18, 2019

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller, much more acclaimed for her memoirs of her childhood in Africa, penned this book after moving to Wyoming.  I recognized her name, loved the cover, and was actually in Wyoming, so I couldn't resist picking this up at a gift shop east of Yellowstone.  I started it on the plane ride home and couldn't put it down.  

I've driven across Wyoming twice in my life now, and there's something amazing about it.  It's still got a wild, untamed sort of feel that I've never experienced anywhere else.  Its sprawling miles of mountains and plains are staggeringly beautiful, but they do have that edge of danger about them too.  While passing through, I really wanted to know what it was like to live there, not just passing through on warm late spring day, but what it would feel like to live there year round.

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant gave me a taste of it, and not necessarily a sweet one.  Colton is the young son of an oil rig worker.  Never much good at school and always looking to follow in his father's footsteps, it was practically inevitable that Colton himself would one day end up working on the rigs.  Fuller paints a picture of a mostly happy go lucky, good hearted kid, growing up on the high plains of Wyoming, breaking horses, hunting, camping, going out on the rodeo circuit but ultimately heading to work for big oil.

In this lightly re-imagined telling of Colton's life, Fuller manages to bring out that spirit Wyoming seems to wear on its face, indescribable open spaces and mountain vistas that only thinly disguise a harder edge.  The people she introduces readers to are hard living, hard working, decent types carving a life out in a place that's not quite hospitable.  At the same time, Fuller is writing a scathing indictment of big oil, an industry that dominates Wyoming's economy, preying on a lack of other opportunity and an often undereducated workforce trying to eke out a living.

Fuller expertly draws out the lives of Colton and his family and friends, showing us a big hearted, loyal boy who grew into young family man trying to earn a living to support his wife and kids.  Fuller, just as skillfully, lets readers in on the issues with big oil in Wyoming - the hours, the undertraining, the under-penalized safety violations, and countless underhanded ways of sticking it to a labor pool that doesn't have much other opportunity.

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is heavy with foreshadowing.  There isn't a moment in the book, even while Fuller amuses us with Colton's childhood antics, that doesn't carry the weight of looming tragedy.  This book is a true heartbreaker of a story and a powerful call to action against the sort of corporate greed that ruins both landscapes and lives.  Highly recommended.

Monday, February 11, 2019

Natural Flights of the Human Mind by Clare Morrall

I have this super duper bad habit.  I buy ebooks like a fiend, not that I don't buy all books like a fiend, but it's a little too easy to fire off $1.99 to Amazon and have a shiny new ebook at your disposal that you ultimately never read because...time.  I love paper books.  99 times out of 100 I will choose to read one of my overabundance of paper books over picking one of the many very exciting titles sitting neglected on my Kindle.  Honestly, it takes my old friend the LibraryThing "choose a random book from your library" function to even get my eyes on an ebook.  Now, if I only I had all my ebooks cataloged there.  That's a work in progress I'll never hope to catch up with.  Happily, though, the randomizer drew one from ebook obscurity for my first read of the year, and I'm glad because it was a winner.

Natural Flights of the Human Mind introduces two damaged, mysterious characters in a seaside village on the English coast.  The first is Peter Straker, a misfit who lives in an abandoned lighthouse that each day grows closer to falling into the turbulent sea.  Despite having no job, Straker lives a regimented life governed by numbers and routine.  Creeping in around the edges of his carefully managed, solitary life are the voices of the 78.  The 78 are the victims of a mysterious accident Straker believes himself to have caused.

Imogen Doody is a school caretaker determined to live life on her own terms after a young marriage that ended in disaster.  Fortified by a powerful anger that gives her the control over her surroundings that she desperately craves, she's willingly walled off from any human companionships, fending of all advances from her family and would-be friends with her prickly attitude.  Fatefully, she comes into some abandoned property from her long lost godfather.  As she struggles to restore the abandoned cottage, Doody crosses paths with the mysterious Straker, and the two make a connection that sets in motion a series of extraordinary events that neither could have anticipated that sets them both on the path to destruction...or redemption.

This books is definitely a slow burn, carefully drawing out the often unlikeable but all-too-sympathetic main characters, peeling off the layers of their stories little by little, revealing their damaging histories, unpacking the troubled pasts that led them to their solitary, broken lives. The seaside village where the two collide, despite its beauty, is rendered starkly, a place of exile for Straker who hopes the whipping coastal winds will one day be powerful enough to sweep him and his lighthouse away.

If you're the sort of person who's ever wondered what the life of somebody foolishly or even unwittingly responsible for tragedy would be like, Natural Flights of the Human mind is a compelling glimpse into that psyche.  I never expected this one to be a page turner, but I found myself rushing toward the finish desperate to see if the troubled characters Morall had brought me to care for would find redemption.  Flights is a haunting and beautiful story of perils of inadequacy and guilt and the power of love and forgiveness.