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Book Reviewed by:An exquisite, slender first novel set on the American frontier about a restless widower who heads west on a foolhardy and perilous expedition in search of unknown animals, leaving his intrepid young daughter behind to fend for herself at home.
Addled by grief and dissatisfaction, thirty-five-year-old mule breeder John Cyrus Bellman takes one step and then another. With a small compass and meager provisions, he sets off into the wild frontier beyond his small farm in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, on a doomed quest prompted by reports of colossal animal bones found in Kentucky. Promising to return in two years, Bellman leaves behind his only daughter Bess to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister Julie. With only a battered wall clock, her dead mother's gold ring, and a barnyard full of miserable animals to call her own, Bess is forced to make her way in a deceptively hostile world, tracing her father's path with arcane maps at the local subscription library and shrinking from the attentions paid to her and her aunt by their peculiar neighbor Elmer Jackson.
Meanwhile, Bellman ventures farther into the harsh and alien landscape of the west, forging an uneasy but intimate fellowship with his guide, an American Indian boy who regards him with both suspicion and a piercing understanding. As father and daughter alike reach out into their own respective wildernesses, they find that the wilderness holds out its hands to them as well.
Bold and lyrical, this brief epic transports readers to the beginning of the nineteenth century to explore themes of reckless determination, existential yearning, wonder, and isolation in a majestic and unforgiving landscape.
While West is a slim novel, it rarely feels slight. The search for the unknown is the thematic backbone here and Davies has done well to present Cy's ambition as both noble quest and fool's errand. There was perhaps an opportunity for West to be a weightier, more immersive book. As such its brevity never thoroughly explores the sheer scale and vastness of Cy's expedition across America. Too much of the journey is glossed over in stark, unadorned sentences which at times robs the alien terrain of its sublime beauty...continued
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(Reviewed by Dean Muscat).
Carys Davies' novella West, is set a decade after the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition. Protagonist John Cyrus Bellman's obsession with journeying into the West echoes the ambitions and objectives of the famous adventurers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who desired to explore the unknown American frontier and detail what they found there.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition took place over two years from 1804 to 1806, and it was the first European expedition to cross the continental divide and travel through the western portion of the United States to reach the Pacific Northwest. The journey began in St. Louis, Missouri in May 1804, and continued through what today are known as Kansas City, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska.
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An audacious and enigmatic debut of thrilling dimensions, and a reminder of fiction's possibilities.
