One day a few years ago, in my local independent bookshop, staff member Sallie and I were talking about books, and she took from the shelf a slim, newly published hardback novel, West (2018) by Carys Davies, and told me how much she loved it.
The book was – and still is, for I bought it – a beautiful thing. Its cover reproduces a nineteenth-century painting: rocks and thickly leaved trees tower over a tiny explorer and his horse. The title is set in large silver-grey letters on an expanse of stark white. This counterpoint of density and space, of old and new, reflects the story inside.
It begins with Cy Bellman riding away from his self-built Pennsylvania house. He is embarking on a journey that may take two years; more than a thousand miles out, and as many home. ‘But worth it if you find them,’ says Bess, his 10-year-old daughter.
We remain ignorant of what it is that Cy Bellman is after for some time. But then we learn how his quest had begun, months earlier, with a newspaper article; we see him engrossed in the description of colossal skeletons discovered in Kentucky, ‘teeth the size of pumpkins, shoulder blades a yard wide’. Great vistas open up for Cy. Maybe these monsters still walk the earth. ‘Just thinking about it had given him a kind of vertigo.’
He becomes increasingly convinced that these creatures still exist, deep in the wilderness that Lewis and Clark have begun to chart. Their two-year expedition ended in 1806; it’s spoken of in West as ‘not more than a dozen years ago’, so it’s now around 1818. With a light touch Carys Davies slips us into the past.
As Cy prepares to leave, he takes certain things with him: his dead wife’s blouse, and her thimble, both packed for barter (Cy hopes that Bess won’t notice; she does), his brown coat, his new stovepipe hat, the traveller’s inkwell in hi
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Subscribe now or Sign inOne day a few years ago, in my local independent bookshop, staff member Sallie and I were talking about books, and she took from the shelf a slim, newly published hardback novel, West (2018) by Carys Davies, and told me how much she loved it.
The book was – and still is, for I bought it – a beautiful thing. Its cover reproduces a nineteenth-century painting: rocks and thickly leaved trees tower over a tiny explorer and his horse. The title is set in large silver-grey letters on an expanse of stark white. This counterpoint of density and space, of old and new, reflects the story inside. It begins with Cy Bellman riding away from his self-built Pennsylvania house. He is embarking on a journey that may take two years; more than a thousand miles out, and as many home. ‘But worth it if you find them,’ says Bess, his 10-year-old daughter. We remain ignorant of what it is that Cy Bellman is after for some time. But then we learn how his quest had begun, months earlier, with a newspaper article; we see him engrossed in the description of colossal skeletons discovered in Kentucky, ‘teeth the size of pumpkins, shoulder blades a yard wide’. Great vistas open up for Cy. Maybe these monsters still walk the earth. ‘Just thinking about it had given him a kind of vertigo.’ He becomes increasingly convinced that these creatures still exist, deep in the wilderness that Lewis and Clark have begun to chart. Their two-year expedition ended in 1806; it’s spoken of in West as ‘not more than a dozen years ago’, so it’s now around 1818. With a light touch Carys Davies slips us into the past. As Cy prepares to leave, he takes certain things with him: his dead wife’s blouse, and her thimble, both packed for barter (Cy hopes that Bess won’t notice; she does), his brown coat, his new stovepipe hat, the traveller’s inkwell in his lapel. These tangible objects make his world real for us; only later do we see how each of them will have an important role to play in the story. Bess thinks her father ‘grand and powerful and brave . . . like someone with a mission that made him different from other people’. His sister and the townspeople scorn this quixotic impulse; some consider it just the ‘childish dissatisfaction’ of men nearing forty. But it is what had made him leave England for America, long before. It is his essence. Even his love for his daughter doesn’t stop him from heading out. He can’t explain it to anyone. But, once in the wilderness,he wondered if it was because it seemed possible that, through the giant animals, a door into the mystery of the world would somehow be opened. There were times, out here in the west, when he lay down at night and, wrapped in his coat, he’d look up at the sky, its wash of stars, gaze up at the bright, broken face of the moon and wonder what might be up there too . . .It’s almost a religious quest, though he doesn’t believe in God. On the journey he acquires a young Native American guide, a boy called ‘Old Woman from a Distance’. The boy doesn’t believe in God either; having seen his people suffer so much, he thinks that if the Great Spirit ever existed, it has surely gone away by now. Neither Cy nor the boy knows they share this disbelief. Cy assumes his companion watches him protectively, but it’s really something else, born of the boy’s experiences. Those experiences will be crucial to what happens later, in a resolution some might think too neat, but I find well-earned and deeply satisfying. West has been likened, by Colm Toibín and others, to myth, folk, tale or legend. Perhaps, but it has more dimensions, more layers, than a typical fable. The chapters move back and forth between Cy, travelling ever deeper into the west, and Bess, waiting at home back east. She longs for him; his promised letters do not come, and she is not safe. The distance is enormous; neither knows what is happening to the other. We watch Cy sicken, and Beth become more vulnerable. The chapters grow briefer, and the atmosphere tautens, like the bowstring the young Native American draws back to fire an arrow. The structure of West was something new for Carys Davies. Already a successful short-story writer when she began the book, in writing it she discovered what she calls ‘the pleasure of the chapter’. By alternating the worlds, she has said, ‘there is space for the reader in the spaces between the chapters’. In West she brings to life the perennial tension between the desire for exploration and the desire for home. The writing is unadorned, but it has rhythm and poetry, and despite the novel’s economy its characters are fully alive, shown as others see them, and also inhabited from within.
At night, in the firelight, he watched the shadows come and go across the boy’s illuminated face . . . and thought, What is it like to be you? He felt again the dizzying weight of all the mystery of the earth and everything in it and beyond it. He felt the resurgence of his curiosity and his yearning, and at the same time felt more and more afraid that he would never find what he’d come for, that the monsters, after all, might not be here. With his finger he traced the pattern of flowers that wound its way around the circumference of Elsie’s thimble, round like the world, and wished himself home again.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Christine Whittemore 2024
About the contributor
Christine Whittemore is the author of Inscription, an award-winning novel that interweaves two women’s voices, one modern, one in the first-century Roman world; and Sudden Arabesque, a poetry collection. She’s working on a novel set in 1850 and the (almost) present day.
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