Fencing the Sky : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Great writing!
Review: A book I will read several times and. Very well written and a scathing take on the "back to nature" lemmings who want to spread all the woes of overpopulation into the very open spaces they yearn to experience. After reading this book I feel that I have a new author to enjoy and am pleased to see that he has written several.

Rating:
Summary: Great writing!
Review: A book I will read several times and. Very well written and a scathing take on the "back to nature" lemmings who want to spread all the woes of overpopulation into the very open spaces they yearn to experience. After reading this book I feel that I have a new author to enjoy and am pleased to see that he has written several.

Rating:
Summary: South of Laramie
Review: A truly lovely read. I'm much reminded of Abby's classic, "The Brave Cowboy" both in tone and in the story itself. What helps is that Mr. Galvin, who spends some of his time as a rancher (hopefully not on one of the postage stamp-sized 'ranchettes' that he pokes at)adds authenticity to his wonderfully told story of the changing western landscape. Mr. Galvin, in his telling of this romanticized tale, suggests that the changing west is not necessarily changing for the better with the demise of the traditional rancher in favor of the transplated urbanite.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful reading!
Review: If Wyoming poet James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky" were the last Western novel ever written, the genre would have come full circle: A melodrama in which violence is righteous if committed in the name of protecting the good folks who scratch out a meager existence in an unconquerable landscape.

The plot is a timeworn Western motif: Greed versus idealism. But the book itself, intentionally or not, is a unique artifact of Western consciousness and environment. Its moments of lyric natural beauty -- and there are many -- are occasionally obscured by old-fashioned doctrinaire preachiness, like the ageless mountains behind Denver's brown cloud. Something funny happened on the way to the ranch, and we have forgotten that the now-romanticized ranchers and cowboys who settled this country were, in many ways, no less exploitive and ambitious than the developers who have now replaced railroad barons as the bad guys in regional fiction. It wasn't all that long ago that the bad guys in our stories were the guys who built fences and shot sheepherders. The landscape of Western literature doesn't change, only the good guys and the bad guys.

kay, it's a lot easier to mourn the loss of Western culture than the throttling of the two-dimensional bad guy Merriweather Snipes, but Galvin takes the melodrama to an extreme: The "good" guy -- in this case, a murderer -- ultimately faces no social consequence for his law-breaking. True, it's a book about violence and greed, but it justifies almost anything as long as the land is protected. And there's a paper-thin line between passion and rage. The malignant Snipes never breaks the law, he just has values (admittedly reptilian) that collide with Mike Arans's. The West is wild, to be sure, but do we really want to believe that violence in the service of one man's sense of virtue is permissible?

Galvin's "The Meadow" was one of the most beautiful and enchanting books to be written in or about the West in the past 10 years, and is arguably among the three best books about Wyoming ever. "Fencing the Sky" is just the latest in the burgeoning genre of Western literature exploring the delicate relationship between landscape and how it suffers modern human activity. Ivan Doig's "Mountain Time" and Larry McMurtry's memoir, "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," are sturdier explorations of the state of the Western landscape, but neither captures the poetic puzzle of the place as well as Galvin.

Rating:
Summary: Poetic vision of the passing West
Review: James Galvin is a poet, and his vision of the people who inhabit the land where this story takes place is also poetic. Instead of a straightforward narrative from beginning to middle to end, it intermingles scenes from the lives of several characters told in flashbacks and flashforwards, all sequenced along the spine of a single plot line that involves the pursuit of a fugitive who has killed another man.

The location is northern Colorado and parts of Wyoming extending through the Great Divide Basin and northward into the mountains. The main characters are men with ties to the land -- a rancher, a cowboy, a doctor. Each is witness in his own way to the passing of the rural West and its replacement by land developers and the mining and logging industries.

They are also remnants of a code of honor that respects hard work, the individual, the land and its wildlife, and the values of courage, loyalty, and generosity. In particular, Galvin captures the nuances of friendship between these very individual men and the way matters of concern to them are often lightened with ironic and self-deprecating humor. I enjoyed this book and found myself caring very much for the welfare of its fugitive protagonist.

I recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in the modern West. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Frank Clifford's nonfiction book "Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide," which finds many of the same kinds of people from real life and explores in greater depth many of the land use issues raised by Galvin's book. As of this writing, "Fencing the Sky" seems to be going out of print. I'm hoping that it reappears shortly in paperback and has a new life for new readers in that format.

Rating:
Summary: South of Laramie
Review: This the area where I grew up, after reading one of the reviews felt the need to" speak my piece". Don't read this unless you read The Meadow first. This story isn't about land barons it's about the little guy we all know in the new west the ones who hang on to the dream. It has a wonderful crazy twist that we've seen in many of the true life small ranch owners. Enjoy it for the story with all the twists and turns of a Wyoming creek.