A couple of years ago, Ivan Doig's novel The Whistling Season became one of my favorites. Set in Montana at the turn of the century (the 20th, not the 21st!), young Paul narrates as his widowed father answers the ad of a woman looking for work as a housekeeper. Rose, the housekeeper, sweeps into town with the unexpected addition of her brother, Morrie.
Morrie's next chapter is the subject of Doig's newest novel, Work Song. A few years have passed, and Morrie has been travelling the world. He is looking to stake a claim on a new life in Butte, Montana, where copper mining is a lucrative business. Morrie is a bit of a fancy man--picture Frasier Crane in an earlier time. Fussy, verbiose, and a bit of a showman, Morrie has the knack of stepping into things at critical times, for better or for worse.
This novel did not live up to my expectations for it. Paul, the boy in The Whistling Season, was much easier for me to warm up to--his naive and innocent outlook set the tone for that novel. Morrie is a man with a lot of experience and a lot of mistakes under his belt. He's just not quite as sympathetic.
Beyond that, part of Work Song's plot seemed preposterous to me. The local copper miners' union is fighting the evil mining company, Anaconda, for fairer compensation and safety considerations. Morrie lands in the middle of it all, and the solution that he and the union leader, Jared, come up with seems flimsy at best. Beyond that, many of the characters feel too much like "characters"--for instance, the two retired miners who share Morrie's boarding house could sometimes pass for Larry's brothers Daryl, and his other brother Daryl, on the old show "Newhart."
My grumbling aside, I still enjoy Doig's style. He has a sense of humor. He describes Montana beautifully, and it's hard for me to resist a protagonist who is so taken with antiquarian books! I would love to visit the imagined library in this novel.
It's a curious thing to me how many books I've read recently that have to do with mining and miners, which is not a subject I set out to read about. Is this a trend in fiction or just with me? It's a topic with which an author can indirectly make reference to the state of our global environment as well as how corporations treat employees, as mining has such effects on the landscape and the people. Whiter Than Snow by Sandra Dallas, Emily's Ghost by Denise Giardina, any book I've read by Silas House--all touch on mining and the difficulties that miners face.
If you loved The Whistling Season, this might be worth reading just to follow up on one of the more colorful characters. However, Work Song would not be the novel I'd dig into as an introduction to the fiction of Ivan Doig.
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