• About Me
  • Contact Me
  • Policies
  • Welcome

Novelhistorian

~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Tag Archives: Carys Davies

Lacking Compulsion: West

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

book review, Carys Davies, Chekhov, exploration, historical fiction, inner life, Kentucky, lack of sweep, Lewis and Clark, literary fiction, nineteenth century, Pennsylvania

Review: West, by Carys Davies
Scribner, 2018. 149 pp. $22

Sometime around 1817, John Cyrus Bellman, an English immigrant to central Pennsylvania, reads about old bones discovered in Kentucky, perhaps belonging to an ancient, unknown animal. Bellman has never heard the like, and he’s immediately transfixed. What kind of creature could it be? Why didn’t Captains Lewis and Clark happen on them during their explorations? Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if he, Bellman, saw these creatures and brought back news of the discovery? So he leaves his motherless eleven-year-old daughter, Bess, in the care of his sister, Julie, and heads west, alone, figuring to follow Lewis and Clark’s footsteps.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, merged public-domain images (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

It’s a grand scheme, about dreams and dreamers, beautiful in its simplicity. Is Bellman an irresponsible lunatic, as his sister thinks, burdening her with the care of a young girl who barely knew her late mother? But Bess herself, though she loves her father dearly and will miss him, believes in her heart that he’ll find the creatures he’s looking for and return to her. Bess is a dreamer herself, a solitary, sensitive child who wishes she could go to school. You sense that she has wider horizons than the few people she comes in contact with, and that she embodies her father’s spirit.

Davies, a short-story writer of note, spares few words. Her opening chapters offer a primer on how to draw the reader’s attention and allegiance. She creates tension in small moments, using simple words to convey her characters’ thoughts, as with Bellman’s, when he contemplates making his journey:

He cooked, and occasionally he cleaned, and made sure Bess had a pair of shoes on her feet, but he was silent the whole time and sometimes his eyes turned glassy and he would not let Bess come near him. The giant beasts drifted across his mind like the vast creature-shaped clouds he saw when he stood in the yard behind the house and tipped his head up to the sky. When he closed his eyes, they moved behind the lids in the darkness, slowly, silently, as if through water — they walked and they drifted, pictures continually blooming in his imagination and then vanishing into the blackness beyond, where he could not grasp them. . .

But as a novel, West doesn’t work. In fact, I have a hard time calling it a novel, and not only because its 149 pages appear as sparsely populated in sentences as early nineteenth-century Kentucky was in people. The chapters are necessarily brief bits, and though Davies’s skill at creating broad impressions from tiny details would make Chekhov nod in appreciation, the episodes barely skim the surface.

Only one paragraph, a third of the way through, gives a hint of why Bellman has this dream. But even that little is already more than the narrative suggests about Bess’s yearnings. What does she want an education for? What does she think of Lewistown, the nearest settlement, aside from the church she’s made to attend, whose services she finds empty? And what of Julie — what’s her story? What does she want, and why did she emigrate?

There’s simply not enough inner life in West to go around, which makes it all the more difficult to believe the arresting premise. Because yes, Bellman’s idea is lunacy, so much so that it’s utterly implausible. Bellman must realize, at least in part, that Lewis and Clark were more knowledgeable and better equipped than he, yet he charges ahead, with little thought of Bess or Julie. It’s also a head-scratcher why, if the creatures were sighted in Kentucky, he thinks to go a thousand miles or more past that; but never mind.

All the more reason, then, for the narrative to focus on his motives. Is he drawn by the youth and promise of the still-new country, of travelers’ reports of natural beauty, or an extension of whatever it was that led him to cross the Atlantic? West is mum about all that. Well, then, does he have a philosophical or scientific interest in possibly extinct creatures? Nope. His attraction is just mythic, and I sense that we’re supposed to accept it on the author’s say-so.

But how? Davies is so tight-fisted with details of scenery or geography — for a novel that attempts sweep, its camera eye feels devoted to close-ups — that the grandeur and scope of the country seldom come across. Such strong novels as The Landbreakers, The Way West, or News of the World succeed, in part, because they convey all that and more. From those narratives you can see how frontier America was a wild, dangerous place, and no intelligent person would have jeopardized himself or his young daughter so carelessly, unless he had the most compelling urge.

It’s that compulsion, or lack of it, that undoes West.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Recent Posts

  • Good, Evil, and Hope: Deacon King Kong
  • The Marsh Girl: Where the Crawdads Sing
  • No Quarter: Wolves of Eden
  • Heresies: The King at the Edge of the World
  • Orwell’s Vision: The Last Man in Europe

Recent Comments

2020 – A Year… on Missing, Presumed: The Poppy…
Novelhistorian on Hard Life Lessons: Domini…
Mila on Hard Life Lessons: Domini…
Novelhistorian on Tormented Souls: The White Fea…
Juxtabook on Tormented Souls: The White Fea…

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Categories

  • Comment
  • Reviews and Columns
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blogs I Follow

  • Rewriting History
  • Damyanti Biswas
  • madame bibi lophile recommends
  • For Readers, Writers, & Lovers of Historical Fiction
  • Suzy Henderson
  • Flashlight Commentary
  • Diary of an Eccentric

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 153 other followers

Follow Novelhistorian on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • Good, Evil, and Hope: Deacon King Kong
  • The Marsh Girl: Where the Crawdads Sing
  • No Quarter: Wolves of Eden
  • Heresies: The King at the Edge of the World
  • Orwell’s Vision: The Last Man in Europe

Recent Comments

2020 – A Year… on Missing, Presumed: The Poppy…
Novelhistorian on Hard Life Lessons: Domini…
Mila on Hard Life Lessons: Domini…
Novelhistorian on Tormented Souls: The White Fea…
Juxtabook on Tormented Souls: The White Fea…

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Contents

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Rewriting History

How writers turn history into story, and story into history

Damyanti Biswas

For lovers of reading, writing, travel, humanity

madame bibi lophile recommends

Reading: it's personal

For Readers, Writers, & Lovers of Historical Fiction

Suzy Henderson

What's new and old in historical fiction

Flashlight Commentary

What's new and old in historical fiction

Diary of an Eccentric

writings of an eccentric bookworm

Cancel