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The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage (1977) French title: La Reine de l’Idaho. Translated by Pierre Furlan.
I believed I lived in Maine because Maine is about as far as I could get from the ranch in Montana where I grew up, and where my mother was unhappy, my beautiful, angel mother.
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage was originally published under the title I Heard My Sister Speak My Name. The change was made in 2001 with the author’s approval.
When the book opens, Thomas Burton, a novelist who lives in Maine, receives a letter from Amy Nofzinger who claims to be his sister. She was born before him and was abandoned by their parents. From then on, Thomas tries to unearth the truth in order to know if her claim is founded. We’re in the 1970s, there are no DNA tests.
When and why would his mother have abandoned a child? How could he reconcile this fact with the mother he knew and loved? She’s dead, he can’t confront her. That leaves him with digging into his memories and writing to his aunts who still live in the west, even after the ranch was sold. The whole novel relates his quest.
Thomas was born in 1912 and came from Idaho royalty. His mother’s family ran a vast and rich sheep ranch and his grandparents were a powerful couple, unusual in their respective roles. His grandmother Emma wore the pants and had married someone who happily let her manage and develop their ranch. Grandpa Thomas was more interested in nature, in bonding with people and especially children. They were lucky to complement each other and back in the 19th, Emma was happy to find a man who let her develop her talents.
Emma was a force of nature and ran the show with an iron fist. She died at 88, which means she had influence over her children during most of their lives. His aunts still think of what their mother would say about their actions. Emma’s power hasn’t gone.
Thomas’s mother, Elizabeth, was obedient and closer to her father. She was supposed to marry a hotshot heir from the East coast when she fell for the charming Thomas Burton, married him, and left Idaho. She divorced him when Thomas was two and her mother married her to a rancher in Montana. Her life didn’t turn out so well.
In The Sheep Queen, Thomas Savage explores various themes around identity.
Amy and Thomas were both adopted, Amy by the parents who raised her and Thomas by his stepfather. As soon as she knew she was adopted, Amy wanted to know who her birth parents were. She loved her adoptive parents; they were lovely but she always felt that she was a second choice replacement as they adopted her because their son had died.
Thomas never felt at ease with his stepfather’s surname. He never felt he belonged to the ranch in Montana where he grew up after his mother remarried. He kept in touch with his father who wasn’t a reliable man. He had his mother, though.
Amy and Thomas lacked the unconditional love that children deserve to grow with deep and strong roots. Their foundations weren’t a given, they had to work for their steadiness. Thomas always feels a bit out-of-touch with the people around him.
Elizabeth is the product of her time. She had to obey her parents, what she truly wanted had no real value. Emma had a clan-based conception of the family. She expected loyalty and compliance to their status in Idaho. She was formidable and Elizabeth could not stand up to her.
The Sheep Queen is autobiographical. According to Thomas Savage’s bio on Wikipedia, a lot of details about Thomas Burton’s life are the same as his. He didn’t even change the first names.
I thought that the construction of the novel was a bit clumsy at times. We hear a lot about Amy at the beginning and then no more, except as a reference to the letters she exchanges with Thomas. The ending which discloses important information about Elizabeth has details already mentioned in The Power of the Dog, which means that they are based on true facts. I thought they were brilliant when I was reading a novel, but I found them appalling as being real events from Savage’s past.
A fascinating novel.
The Corner of Rife and Pacific by Thomas Savage – 30 years in Grayling, Montana
The Corner of Rife and Pacific by Thomas Savage (1988) French title: Rue du Pacifique. Translated by Pierre Furlan.
And we’re back in Montana with a novel by Thomas Savage, The Corner of Rife and Pacific. Savage’s earlier novel, The Power of the Dog was part of the Read-the-West readalong that I did with my sister-in-law. We decided to go for another year of reading books together. In September, we read the excellent Cry Father by Benjamin Whitmer and our choice for October was The Corner of Rife and Pacific. In November, we’re reading The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert.
In The Corner of Rife and Pacific, Thomas Savage takes us to Grayling, Montana. A quick search on Wikipedia shows that there’s no Grayling in Montana but that Grayling, Michigan is where Jim Harrison was born.
When the book opens, we’re in 1890, the town of Grayling is officially founded and Mr Rife is its first mayor. He’ll become a street name. Two families were present at the ceremony, the Metlens and the Connors who arrived from California in the 1880s. They’re Pacific.
An omniscient narrator with a storyteller voice starts to tell us the story of these two families, with the Metlen in the foreground and the Connors in the background. John Metlen and his wife Lizzie settled in Grayling on a ranch. Later, they also had a hotel in town. The Connors settled in town and became bankers.
We follow the Metlens from 1890 to 1920, from the foundation of the town to its thirtieth anniversary. The local aristocracy is made of the families who were there when the town was founded, recreating a system of class inherited from the old world.
Besides the Metlen family’s story, we witness the world change during these years and it comes to Grayling too. Advertising, phones, cars, new technologies appear, but that would be the same for any novel set in that time. The two families don’t have the same vision of life, the Metlens want to live decently and peacefully besides the Shoshones tribes. The Connors are ambitious moneymakers and support the removal of the native Americans from their land.
Thomas Savage describes the foundation of a pioneer mythology. The locals celebrate the foundation of their city and reinvent their past. They do a carnival where women come dressed up in “old time” costumes, which means that they wear their mothers’ clothes. They do rodeos. Amateurs go on stage and play historical moments of the pioneer history. They don’t embarrass themselves with historical accuracy, taking in all that looks old.
Savage says that the locals have lost part of their past because it stayed back in Europe with the families left behind when the first family member came and settled in Montana. These towns with no history, no past have to create their own history, to have common grounds and strengthen their roots. We all need to know where we come from and the community of Grayling builds their own legend and roots. It’s based on a certain idea of masculinity, the myth of the cowboy and of the pioneers.
John Melten and his son Zack don’t fit well in this idea of masculinity. Lizzie says John is a dreamer and a poet. They have a balanced relationship and John relies on her for moral support. She’s also a good listener, a sounding board. Zack isn’t fond of hunting, horse-riding or any other outdoorsy activities. He’s intelligent and into science and communications technologies. His parents support his endeavors and he’s not pressured to run the ranch or take over the hotel. They seem a bit eccentric among the others or simply ahead of their time.
Thomas Savage was born in 1915 in Salt Lake City and was raised on a ranch in Montana. John Melten and his wife Lizzie have common traits with the Phil and George’s parents in The Power of the Dog. I wonder if The Corner of Rife and Pacific is not also a quiet tribute to Savage’s family and his Western roots.
I think that The Power of the Dog is a better book than The Corner of Rife and Pacific but it is still an easy and enjoying read.
The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage – rush for it.
The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage (1967) French title: Le pouvoir du chien. Translated by Laura Derajinski.
Phil always did the castrating; first he sliced off the cup of the scrotum and tossed it aside; next he forced down the first one and then the other testicle, slit the rainbow membrane that enclosed it, tore it out, and tossed it into the fire where the branding irons glowed. There was surprisingly little blood. In a few moments, the testicles exploded like huge popcorn. Some men, it was said, ate them with a little salt and pepper. “Mountain oysters,” Phil called them with that sly grin of his, and suggested to young ranch hands that if they were fooling around with the girls they’d do well to eat them, themselves.
Phil’s brother George, who did the roping, blushed at the suggestion, especially since it was made before the hired men. George was a stocky, humorless, decent man, and Phil liked to get his goat. Lord, how Phil did like to get people’s goats!
No one wore gloves for such delicate jobs as castrating, but they wore gloves for almost all other jobs to protect their hands against rope burns, splinters, cuts, blisters. They wore gloves roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay out to cattle, even simply riding, running horses or trailing cattle. All of them, that is, except Phil. He ignored blisters, cuts and splinters and scorned those who wore gloves to protect themselves. His hands were dry, powerful, lean.
This is the opening page of The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage and it sets up the place (a ranch), the two main characters (Phil and George), their relationship (they’re brothers) and this simple scene of ranch life, the castrating, reveals a lot about each brother’s temper.
We are in the 1920s, in Montana. Phil and George run the family ranch and they’re among the wealthiest families in the state. They’re bachelors, Phil is forty and George is thirty-eight. Phil is brighter than George and he’s a complex man. He’s outspoken and rash, always voicing things that would be polite not to mention. He’s the total opposite of political correctness and refuses to play social games. George’s mind is slower but he’s more sensitive to other people’s needs and feelings. See in this paragraph, how Phil purposely hints at sex, knowing George will be ill-at-ease.
Phil loves ranch life and lives it the rough way. It’s described in this paragraph through the gloves thing, a detail that will have a capital importance at the end of the book. Phil washes in the stream near the house, summer and winter. He doesn’t wear gloves, loves to ride and partake in all kind of physical activities. He also doesn’t like changes in his life. He’s a great admirer of a long-dead cowboy, Bronco Henry. He keeps mentioning how Bronco Henry did this or that. Phil is a bit nostalgic about the old days, when Bronco Henry was alive and part of the ranch staff.
Phil and George’s parents have moved out to Salt Lake City, leaving the ranch to their sons. Nothing has changed in the house and the brothers still sleep in their twin beds in their childhood bedroom. Phil is perfectly happy that way and George seems to be too.
In nearest town, Beech, Rose Gordon and her son Peter make ends meet by running an inn after her husband John died. John was a doctor but he never managed to build a good practice in Beech, there’s not enough solvent patients for it. Peter is a clever child, interested in medicine and always buried in books. He’s now a teenager and wants to study medicine. He’s an outsider at school and he’s violently bullied but soldiers on and never complains.
Phil and George go to Rose’s inn during their trip to town to sell and ship off their cattle. George and Rose start talking and much to Phil’s dismay, George marries Rose. She moves into the ranch house and Peter stays away at school.
As you can imagine, Phil isn’t happy about these new circumstances. Thomas Savage is an extraordinary writer who weaves a story, thread after thread, knot after knot until you get the whole tapestry at the last page. It’s also built like Noir, with a growing tension stemming from this lockup situation.
Charismatic and older brother Phil rules everything on the ranch, manages the hands and takes a lot of space with his cocky attitude. Rose cannot find her place her new home, she knows that Phil wants her gone and she’s under his watchful eyes and it makes her extremely nervous. George is mostly oblivious, he’s like a horse with blinders because he’s not quick enough to pick on the tension. He thinks that things will get better by themselves, he cannot imagine that his brother could be mean to his wife.
Then Peter comes live on the ranch for the summer and it adds another weight to the relationships’ scale and throws it off balance.
From the beginning, Thomas Savage drops hints about Phil. His parents acknowledge that they know but we don’t know what they refer to. He’s a complex character. He’s mean the way teenagers can be: he says whatever he wants without thinking of the consequences, he teases people, he observes their flaws and swoops down on them and he exposes people’s pretenses. Phil’s development seems stuck at teenager stage.
George is a grownup and a good man. He and Rose have a solid and healthy relationship. They want each other for companionship. She brings him out of his shell and she found a safe harbor in him. He has found someone to talk to and someone who doesn’t compare him to his outspoken and sharp brother and find him lacking.
Thomas Savage (1915-2003) grew up on a ranch in Montana. He knows the landscape and the local way-of-life. He’s worked as a ranch hand before being a university teacher and a full-time writer. It’s palpable in his writing. The setting contributes to the story and its atmosphere. He doesn’t romanticize a rancher’s life. The hands are all unmarries because they have to live on the premises and couldn’t support a family anyway. It’s a life made of hard work during the week, entertainment in town during the weekend and dreams of buying clothes and fancy gloves in catalogues. They live in closer quarters, isolated from the outside world and it fuels the story too.
The tension builds up until the very last pages. It’s remarkable, everything falls into place and all the clues dropped here and there come back to you. The characters are well-developed and I was rooting for Rose and George to find a way to live side-by-side with Phil.
Highly recommended.
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