Lightning [Hardcover]

Doc Windham, the cowboy hero of Lightning, Calgary writer Fred Stenson's terrific fourth novel, is hardly the rugged, tall-hatted sort that readers would know from other rip-roaring tales of the Old West. Sure, Doc displays plenty of pluck, but he's more likely to use his wits than his fists when he's in a sticky patch. In fact, he's prone to worrying and occasionally self-conscious about his short stature. Doc's principal enthusiasms when not on the trail--the science of phrenology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the new sport of bowling--also mark him as peculiar. With a guy like Doc around, it's easy for Stenson to skirt genre conventions while still delivering an authentic and exciting Western.

Much of Lightning takes place in the 1880s, when cowboys led vast herds of cattle north to settle in Montana, Wyoming, and Alberta. The territory is dotted with towns like Cheyenne, a place that counts as "proof almost anything can be done in a tent. Hotel tents, whore tents, drinking tents, food tents. Whatever there was of Cheyenne at the beginning of the day, there would be more by day's end." As a younger man, Doc went from town to town with his girl Pearly, a pool shark with a fiery temper. But when that lifestyle proved too fast for Doc, he ended up abandoned by Pearly and stalked by Overcross, a crazed miner bent on revenge for a bullet Doc put in his head. A few decades later, we catch up with Doc on a cattle drive to Canada. He must confront the dangers in his past as well as the more immediate perils posed by stampedes and surly cowpokes. At least Doc discovers that the Canadian winter suits his heartsick self just fine: "Though the sun has been sliding down the south sky for months, the season has always been summer. Now, like a magician's trick, it is morning and the mountains have turned to white. All that day, you ride the brown hills full of sadness, your heart a hole that the wind blows through."

While Stenson's novel is ostensibly a sequel to his Giller-nominated The Trade, readers need not have read that predecessor to relish Lightning's colourful prose, salty dialogue, and abundance of action. Like The Trade, Lightning benefits from Stenson's wealth of knowledge about the reality of frontier culture and his ability to bring that world to life in a way that's truthful yet entertaining. Doc and his creator may not always use the most direct route to get where they're going, but Lightning is a bold and boisterous piece of storytelling. --Jason Anderson

One distinctive mark of the Western genre is its brutal violence. Life is worth little more than tobacco spit in this literary world where power resides in the barrel of a gun and where lawless cowboys kill time between killing time by stealing, whoring, raping, drinking, gambling and lynching. In Fred Stenson’s Lightning, the sequel to his Giller nominated The Trade, the violence is still there-one character has her face slashed in half and lives-but tamed in order for Stenson to tell his Canadian Western tale like a morality play.
The novel begins in Dillon, Montana in 1881, where the main character, cowboy Doc Windham, a down and out 41-year-old Texan, talks himself and his friends into a job herding cattle from Montana to Cochrane, Alberta. This trek is possible because of the new emerging economy in the West, as the fur trade gives way to open range ranching, made possible by the abundance of wild grasslands replenished after the death of the buffaloes and Comanche Indians.
Along this long trail ride north, Doc Windham, our Everyman, is stalked by death in the form of a young cowboy-in-training named Dwight and a vicious murderer named Ivan Overcross seeking revenge on Doc for blowing part of his head off. Like Everyman, Doc is deserted by his fellowship of cowboys, wins and loses beautiful women, forces himself and Dwight to confession, and finds salvation in his Mason religion and his good deed of rehabilitating an alcoholic ex-Mountie.
For two-thirds of the novel, Stenson alternates the narrative between Doc Windham’s life in 1881 and his life 15 years earlier in 1866. What is revealed in this juxtaposition of Doc Windham’s past and present is that the circle of life is not as simple as the Disney films have us believe; life, as Doc Windham lives it, is more like a yin and yang circle, where his past experiences-his love for a billiard hustler named Pearl, the hanging of his Uncle Jack, and his initiation into the Mason religion-are linked to his present directly and dialectically, conversely and inversely. Regrettably, West does not meet East for long, as Stenson stops alternating the storylines when the herd hits Canada.
The Canadian West is much tamer than the American West. Guns and liquor are controlled, bordellos do not exist, and the Mounties uphold the law. In fact, most of the novel is tame: the gambling is not poker but billiards and bowling; the whores are charitable and loving, and some cowboys and businessmen are not philistines but literate readers. Doc Windham, for instance, loves to read, writes letters, cites Latin, takes in a lecture on phrenology, goes to a play, broods on the philosophy of Seneca, Dickens’s Great Expectations and the poetry of Walt Whitman. Even Doc’s nemesis, the killer Overcross, acts and sings opera, however poorly. This is also a very politically correct western, as Doc Windham, like today’s vaunted sensitive male, urges one drunken cowboy to go on sobriety, welcomes another to have a good cry, and sets aside his homophobia, to lie naked on top of another man to revive him from his frozen state. The love scenes are soft and bereft of male chauvinism as Doc Windham always awaits his lover’s directions.
Like Jack London, Stenson can turn the setting into a character, with his spare Hemingwayesque prose. His description of the cattle exodus to Canada and of the natural elements is compelling, powerful writing:

“Though the sun has been sliding down the south sky for months, the season has always been summer. Now, like a magician’s trick, it is morning and the mountains have turned white. All that day, you ride the brown hills full of sadness, your heart a hole that the wind blows through. Summer’s leaving is every other kind of loss combined. You know the seasons are a cycle, but there is no consolation in that. It only stretches misery ahead of itself; invents the feeling called dread. As for winter, what good can be said about a season when the air, the friend that keeps you alive, turns on you with a dagger?”

With lines like that, one hopes that Stenson’s next work is a collection of poetry.
Clearly, Stenson has taken risks in this novel. His risks mostly succeed, failing only when he tries too hard to avoid typecasting his cowboy hero, Doc Windham. When Doc Windham names literary works, like someone name dropping at a party, and makes literary statements and literary criticism, especially in his explanation of a Whitman poem about evil to his killer, Stenson’s cowboys have ventured too far out of their range-no longer characters but mouthpieces for the author’s ideas. But this is a quibble. Known for his research and attention to historical detail, Stenson has written a valuable work of historical fiction, teaching the public through his stories more about Canadian history than history books.
Peter Yan (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada