During his
lifetime, John Williams wrote three novels: “Butcher’s Crossing” (1960),
“Stoner” (1965), and “Augustus” (1972). Nearly forty years after it was first
published, “Stoner” became a publishing phenomenon after it was rediscovered
through word-of-mouth publicity. To tap into this cult following, Vintage has
now published the other two books also. “Butcher’s Crossing” that, for the most
part, is as good as “Stoner”, and in some aspects, even superior to it.
Will Andrews
is a twenty-three year old Harvard drop-out who is stifled by the droning voices
in the chapel and classrooms. He often escapes from the confines of Cambridge
to the fields and woods where he feels more comfortable. Inspired by Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s lecture on nature, he imagines that his true self lies in the wilderness
where he feels a part and parcel of God, free and uncontained.
In a spirit of
self-discovery, he sets out to seek this wilderness and washes up in Butcher’s
Crossing, Kansas – a shanty little town that is no more than a few wooden houses
with a handful of people, a unremarkable hotel, a rundown bar, and a few women
engaged in the world’s oldest profession. It is 1873, and the buffalo trade is
at its peak. The town is strategically located as a transit point. For years,
the hunters in the region have been killing the mighty buffaloes in thousands
for their hides to feed the fashion industry. However, relentless trade and
mindless culling of the animal, has depleted the stock. Now, the more desirable
thick winter hides are accessible only in the higher mountains.
Before long,
Andrews is persuaded into financing a hunting expedition into the Colorado
Rockies by Miller, an experienced hunter. Miller had come across a massive herd
of buffalo a few years back in a hidden valley high up in the mountains and has
been on the lookout for partners for an expedition that promises immense
riches. Miller assembles a team comprising Charles Hoge, an alcoholic who is to
be the wagon driver; the practical Fred Schneider, who is going to skin the
animals; and Andrews who is going on the ride to seek his true self. He is to
be the apprentice skinner and the odd job man in the team.
The expedition
progresses perilously through extremely harsh terrain and inhospitable land.
Miller, in order to save journey time, takes them through a waterless, arid
region where the team of men and animals nearly perish due to thirst. After
weeks of travel they finally arrive in the high valley and find a giant herd of
buffalo just as Miller had promised. Then starts the mindless hunting, killing,
and skinning of the buffalos described by Williams in graphic detail that is
not for the faint-hearted ones. As readers will know about the carnage
unleashed by Miller, their heart may go out to the dumb but great beasts,
untouched by human race until now, who are unable to react. They just look away
vacantly as they are picked up one by one by Miller’s gun.
Miller’s
relentless and mechanical hunt continues while Schneider and Andrews struggle
to keep pace with skinning of animals before they freeze and rigor mortis sets
in. Slowly, Andrews’s conscience starts troubling him at the malicious murder
of the buffalos and he starts sensing the true nature of Miller’s butchery.
In the midst
of the hunt and his increasing disgust with it, he tries to reason out in his
mind his reaction to what is happening around him:
“It came to
him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea
at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and
turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before
proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a
length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging
grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self
that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he
had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to
face it. So he had turned away.”
Now that they
have shot enough buffalos, Schneider recommends winding up their hunt. But
Miller decides to continue forcing the team to overstay in the valley. Suddenly
the weather is upon them and they get snowed in compelling them to spend
several harsh months in the valley. But they survive, and after the snow melts,
they depart with a huge pile of hides leaving behind an even bigger stock that
they plan to pick up a few months later. Unfortunately, their return journey to
Butcher’s Crossing is disastrous. When they arrive back in the town, the fur
market has collapsed in the meantime, and both Miller and Charles Hoge appear
to lose their minds. The entire expedition and the hardships that they endured
seem pointless. At the close of the novel we see Andrews resume his search for
answers to his identity, but this time on his own.
In so far as
genres go, “Butcher’s Crossing” is a literary western but quite unlike other
popular, commercial, and formulaic novels of this genre. It is quite
disruptive, the disruption being achieved by the preponderance of an overarching
philosophical theme of existentialism running across the plot. Our protagonist,
the young William Andrews, is coming of age, is looking for meaning to his
life, and is willing to risk his life to validate his identity. He believes
this validation lies in nature, and that is what he seeks by going on this
hazardous expedition.
The above
existentialism that swathes the plot, turns “Butcher’s Crossing” into a
treatise on nature, its immense beauty, and on its punishing ferocity. Nature
appears almost as a character with a subtle magnetism that drew readers in
first gradually, then increasingly, and finally insistently so much so that they
read with rapt attention, sometimes more than once, Williams’ exquisite
description of the landscape, topography, and the general environs.
When the
expedition travels through a water scarce zone, the description of men and
animals suffering from thirst is so vivid and stark that readers could almost
feel their mouths dry up while reading. In a rather riveting passage, Williams
describes how Miller uses few dregs of water that are left to moisten the
swollen tongues of animals so that they can last for a few more miles before
they hit water.
The book is
also a sharp indictment on man’s rapacious behaviour towards nature’s bounty in
order to satisfy his greed and commercial interests. The industrial scale
hunting of buffalos in pursuance of Americas’ expeditious expansion into the
West led to the near extinction of the species, glut in the fur market, and the
eventual collapse of the industry.
“You’re no
better than the things you kill” says Mr. McDonald, the middleman in Butcher’s
Crossing whose business is in ruins after the fur market collapse. He may have
been easily talking about the modern man.
John
Williams’s brilliant prose is marked by a syntactical rigor that is visible in
his sentence-level precision. And, it is with this precision that he elevates
this book into a new level of consciousness. The book is utterly compelling and
convincing, and to read it was an exhilarating experience.
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