by Duane Spurlock
Series Launch: #1 King of the Mountain; #2 Lure of the Wild; #3 Savage Rendezvous; #4 Blood Fury; #5 Tomahawk Revenge; #6 Black Powder Justice
I remember how thrilling and wonderful I thought the Robert Redford film, Jeremiah Johnson, was when I saw it in the theatre many moons ago. (And I suspect that fictionalized account about Liver-Eating Johnson was cleaned up by Hollywood.) But mountain man books never appealed to me, even when a coworker recommended the William Johnstone series to me about 10 years back.
But for some reason -- I can’t even remember why -- I decided to try David Robbins’ Wilderness series. (Robbins writes it under the David Thompson pseudonym.) It is a series, so if I liked one or two volumes, I knew I’d have several other entries to read (the series is up to #44 as of this writing). It isn’t written as an adult western series, so I wouldn’t have to worry about my kids getting an indecent eyeful if I left a copy lying around the house. And I was interested in varying my western reading.
I was quite pleased with the first book in the series, King of the Mountain. Robbins writes a clean, smooth prose for a quick-moving tale about a New York City youngster drawn to the Colorado Rockies by his black-sheep uncle. Robbins handles Nate King’s trepidations and worries quite well, quite believably. Each additional volume in the series builds nicely upon the previous, as Robbins traces Nate’s growing confidence and body of wilderness survival knowledge. Robbins does a fine job of providing details about this wilderness lifestyle without derailing his narrative pace or seeming intrusive.
In some ways, the Wilderness series harks back to some of the finer pulp adventure tales set in historical realities. Robbins provides details of contemporary life -- both for the white trappers and the various Indian tribes they encounter -- and information about armaments and whatnot that recalls the way accomplished pulp authors would insert bits of learning into their tales. Likewise, I think Robbins learned a few tricks from reading Edgar Rice Burroughs on how to end a chapter with a cliff hanger.
And Robbins’ writing style never gets in the way of his storytelling. He works in the tradition of plain-language American writers that grew out of the pulps -- Dashiell Hammett (the Continental Op, The Maltese Falcon), George F. Worts (the Peter the Brazen stories that appeared in Argosy), innumerable PBO (paperback original) authors for Gold Medal and other publishers (John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, Dan Marlowe, Edward S. Aarons, Donald Hamilton), to Charles McCarry (Old Boys and other espionage novels) and several others I can’t think of at the moment.
This ability serves Robbins well as he charts Nate King’s course through expansive landscapes. He never trips up his storytelling with overly poetic descriptions of scenery. Even though to readers soaking up Wilderness novels in armchairs, commuting busses, or elsewhere, the setting of Robbins’ novels is seemingly exotic, the author presents his descriptions in passages that fit the story, that don’t overwhelm the narrative moment. This is another trait I think Robbins picked up from E.R. Burroughs -- over the course of eight Barsoom novels, two dozen Tarzan stories, and loads of other adventures, Burroughs knew how to insert necessary landscape details to bring out the exotic without sacrificing the pacing of his story. This is rather different from the way another western author, Zane Grey, used landscapes in his novels. Grey would commonly roll out passage upon passage of description devoted to the landscape. While he pointed to the psychological impact the titanic settings had on his characters -- for example, Jean Isbel is greatly startled by the vast beauty of the Tonto Rim in To the Last Man (whose restored version was recently published under the title Tonto Basin) -- Grey also intended his landscapes to act as the verbal equivalent of the expansive landscapes painted by the Hudson River School (for example, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, the latter well-known for his paintings of western scenes), to reflect the glory and vastness and transcendent nature of Nature.
Robbins works at a different scale. The wonder is there -- Nate King frequently marvels at the natural beauty surrounding him and compares his life in the wild to his days trapped in the smoky, noisy, and crowded New York metropolis -- but the interruption of the reader’s enjoyment of the adventure is minimal, if at all existent.
Robbins considers the Wilderness series to be a generational saga -- and the pacing of the series follows this reasoning: by the sixth book in the series, Nate has been away from the city only eight months. Yet the pacing of the individual books is rapid and action filled. By the end of the first book, Nate has earned an Indian name -- Grizzly Killer -- and taken his first scalp (although this is a practice he’s very reluctant to follow, even though it is accepted and expected behavior in the culture in which he’s trying to live). There are various fights and killings and battles in each book, and Nate kills at least four grizzlies by the time the reader reaches the sixth book (maybe five? I’m a touch foggy on this detail, what with all the gun battles and hand-to-hand fights with evil whites and savage Indians and ravenous wolves and, and...) -- a grizzly usually shows up by Chapter 4 in any of these books. I wonder how many grizzly bears an actual mountain man might have encountered during his life in the wild?
But the action and excitement that are required for a continuing genre series like this are present in each volume. Robbins’ expertise is evident in his ability to get the reader to suspend his disbelief while moving with Nate through this essentially exotic landscape from roughly 150 years ago. When you think about it, that’s not so long ago, really.
The first book introduces Nate to the wilderness at the invitation of his uncle, and he slowly sheds his city ways, but hangs on to his beliefs in civilization. The second through fifth books chart Nate’s apprenticeship in the wild to Shakespeare McNair, a wily mountain man who helps Nate embrace the wilderness life, understand the way of the Indian, and slowly release his illusions about civilized life. During this period Nate’s reputation grows among the scattered mountain men who gather for an annual rendezvous and the various Indian tribes who live and battle in the region. He marries a Shoshone woman, Winona, and he befriends a chief of the Utes -- Two Owls -- despite the fierce hatred that most Utes have for the encroaching whites. By the beginning of the sixth book, Black Powder Justice, Winona is pregnant, and Nate is looking forward to teaching his son the lessons he’s learned about living in the wild. During the course of this novel, he encounters wolves, unscrupulous trappers who kidnap his wife, another grizzly, a Ute warrior, and an Arapahoe war party. Just a few routine days in the snowy Rocky Mountain wilderness.
This brief summary of the first six books in the Wilderness series doesn’t do Robbins’ work justice. He’s writing a very entertaining series of books, and he’s doing it very well. That the series began publishing at the end of the 1980s and that the early volumes have had multiple printings prove that Robbins has a growing audience and is providing the sort of reading enjoyment that a loyal readership expects.
LINKS:
The following volumes (and others) in the Wilderness series are available from Amazon.com. Simply click the title to activate the link:
King of the Mountain (Wilderness No. 1)
Lure of the Wild (Wilderness No. 2)
Savage Rendezvous (Wilderness No. 3)
Blood Fury (Wilderness No. 4)
Tomahawk Revenge (Wilderness No 5)
Black Powder Justice (Wilderness No. 6)
To learn more about Zane Grey’s Tonto Basin -- the author’s restored original version of the novel published as To The Last Man -- in hardcover (at this writing, not yet in paperback), click here to visit Amazon.com.
Click here to learn more about Zane Grey’s To The Last Man: A Story of the Pleasant Valley War, the edited version of Tonto Basin as it’s been available since its first publication.
Click here to visit Amazon.com to find out more about Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson on DVD.
Posted by ds at March 2, 2005 01:43 PM
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