WHEN Americans feel uneasy, they turn to westerns. The theory is that the western is a nostalgic reaffirmation of what makes America great: rugged individualism, the pioneer spirit and a God-given sense of being in the right.
The United States is
feeling pretty insecure right now, so the publication of Alexandra Fuller's non-fiction novel couldn't be better timed. "This story is a western," notes Fuller, for those who hadn't picked it up from the title or the sepia images of cowboys on the cover. Its subject is Colton H Bryant, one of the thousands of semi-skilled grunts or "oilfield trash", labouring in Wyoming's prodigious oil and gas fields.
There is nothing remarkable about Colton H Bryant and something inevitable about his fate, but this is exactly the point.
We first meet our hero as a child, countering the teasing of his schoolmates with his favourite mantra, "Mind over Matter – if you don't mind, it don't matter", then later as an adolescent immersed in a world of horses, rodeos, fishing, guns and the simple verities.
Already we sense that things aren't going to go well for Colton, a good and simple man trying to get by in a state controlled by corporate oil interests whose stark and single value – maximising profit – pays no dues to our hero's down-home brand of rough-and-tumble innocence.
Fuller, who was born in England, scored a hit with her memoir of growing up in Africa, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. She moved to Wyoming 15 years ago; this is her elegy to the cowboy state and she writes about it in lyrical, folksy prose that seems to straddle Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx but never quite sits straight on Fuller. The "sun set like heartbreak" is close enough to pastiche to pick up some of its sticky smell. Here she is on the 1990s, a mere decade ago: "There was a sense of freedom back then." And here she is again, overreaching in her description of death as "nothing new or old". And there was me, thinking that the only thing older than death is birth.
Though the tale is based on real events, you get the sense that Fuller has never let the truth get in the way of a good story, but she's been honest about her methods and for the most part the tale is better for them. In an author's note, she fesses up to having "disregarded" aspects of Colton's personality – the ugly bits, presumably – and the result is something of a cartoon hero, an idiot savant and cipher.
All the same, it's hard not to feel engaged by Fuller's passion for Colton and Wyoming, as each throws light on the other, and she makes us feel as if at first hand the fragility of bodies pitched against Wyoming's fearful winters and the hellish drills and derricks of the oilfields.
Through Colton, Fuller tells a wider tale of the indecent greed and exploitative employment practices of oil multinationals where, though "everyone talks about safety, no-one means it as much as they mean money".
That most of the oil is pumped to California, epicentre of the American Dream, is just one of this story's ironies.
So, here you have it, The Legend of Colton H Bryant, an ordinary man trapped in the oily swamp of the American Corporate Nightmare but still daring to look up at the stars. And paying the price for it. A piece of contemporary nostalgia, for sure, but a compelling and affecting one.
• Every Monday, David Robinson, The Scotsman's books editor, selects a book review.
The full article contains 621 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
