New West Book Review

Ivan Doig Explores Butte’s Copper Mining Heyday in “Work Song”

By David Abrams, Guest Writer, 7-13-10

Work Song
By Ivan Doig
Riverhead, 288 pages, $25.95

The strength of a novel often rests on its voice.  Read a few pages of Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Sound and the Fury and you’ll quickly see how a book’s narrator can make or break the reading experience.  Holden, Scout, and Benjy (along with the chorus of other voices in William Faulkner’s masterpiece) are unforgettable tour guides through their books.

Morris “Morrie” Morgan in Ivan Doig’s Work Song is every bit as charming or, depending on your mood, cloying as those other narrators.  Two pages into the novel set in early 20th-century Montana, he’s telling us:  “The most precipitous chapter of life always begins before we quite know it is under way.  With no belongings to speak of, I gathered what was left of my resolve and stepped outside for my first full look at where I had arrived.”

Morrie Morgan is a character from another time, another place—sent here to our literary world dominated by teen vampires and Kindles to remind us of earlier halcyon days when sentences spread languidly across the page.  His encyclopedic patter is front and center on every page of this book and it’s certainly the make-or-break factor: readers will either wholly buy into the esoteric banter of Doig’s character or they’ll put Work Song down after a few dozen pages and move on to something less….old-fashioned.

But “old-fashioned” is exactly what you should expect when approaching an Ivan Doig novel.  The Montana native has built a literary career on books that celebrate the slow-told story, quaint Dickensian characters, meandering plots and, let’s face it, dialogue that borders on cornpone.  His novels emphasize the spirit of community, the hardscrabble grit of Western pioneers, and the value of heritage.  You don’t come to his books to rapidly turn pages and elevate the blood pressure; you come here to relax and allow yourself to be re-absorbed into a way of life that is, day by day, being lost to strip malls and strip mining.  Reading Ivan Doig is a bit like time travel into the past: you should only make the journey if you’ve packed corsets and celluloid collars, and are ready to leave behind your 21st-century cynicism and short-attention span.

In Work Song, we take the trip to Butte, Montana in 1919, a year when The Richest Hill on Earth was a powder-keg of union agitation and ethnic turmoil.  With round-the-clock copper-ore mining (all under the monopolizing thumb of the Anaconda Company), Butte is, as our tour guide Morgan tells us, “a metropolis of nowhere: nearly a hundred thousand people atop the earth’s mineral crown, with nothing else around but the Rocky Mountains and the witnessing sky.” It was a place where miners slept in shifts at boardinghouses, families played at the Coney Island-like Columbia Gardens, saloons and bordellos easily outnumbered churches and schools, and dozens of skeletal mine headframes dotted the Butte hill.  It was as cosmopolitan as Manhattan, as wild and wooly as Deadwood; and Morrie Morgan is perfectly suited to be our eyes and ears as he makes his way through the steep hillside streets.

Work Song marks Morgan’s second appearance in a Doig novel.  We first met him in 2006’s The Whistling Season where he was a swindler on the run from Chicago gangsters pressed into service as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in central Montana.  Now it’s ten years later and Morgan is still on the lam from the mob palookas who want vengeance for a thrown boxing match involving Morgan’s brother.  He arrives in Butte a vagabond: “Here I was once more in that western territory at the very edge of the map of imagination.” Believing he can hide out in the overpopulated mining city, Morgan comes to Butte looking for work and soon finds it—first as an official mourner for a funeral parlor and then, more fitting to his classically-trained temperament, as an assistant to the city’s librarian, a former cattle rancher who now collects rare first-editions of Sir Walter Scott.  Morrie’s glee at being surrounded by great works of literature in a mining town will particularly tickle bibliophilic readers.

It’s not long before Morgan is plunged into local politics; reverberations of the famous War of the Copper Kings have led to poor working conditions among the immigrant miners.  Radical “Reds” are inciting mine employees to strike for better wages while the “copper collars” of the Anaconda Company turn an indifferent eye on the simmering unrest.  Morgan is understandably taken aback by what he’s gotten himself into: “If America was a melting pot, Butte seemed to be its boiling point.”

Eventually, he proves to be the very linchpin labor leaders have been waiting for; by his very nature as a fish out of water, the dapper-mannered Easterner is a perfect foil for the miners who want a book-smart spokesperson.  Morgan makes no effort to hide his wealth of knowledge; whether it’s the wardrobe for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta or batting averages for the Chicago White Sox, he never misses an opportunity to spout.  As one character tells him, “You have the damndest brainbox ever created.”

Even in matters of the heart, Morgan is starched with formality.  When someone asks him why he doesn’t show more of an interest in his beautiful (and available) landlady, he stiffly replies, “I enjoy female companionship when it presents itself, never fear.” And never fear, dear reader, that true love will find Morrie Morgan in the end.  It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Doig’s novels usually end on a happy note—sometimes bittersweet, but always worthy of a tear and a sigh.

As in his previous novels, Doig excels at his descriptions of both characters and the land—often combining the two, as in this moment when Morgan first meets his employer, the eccentric librarian Samuel Sandison:
I am of medium height, but when I turned around, I was seeing straight into a white cloud of beard.  Considerably above that, a snowy cowlick brushed against furrows of the forehead.  In a suit that had gone out of fashion when the last century did, the man frowning down at me had considerable girth at the waist and narrowed at the chest and shoulders; like the terrain around us, he sloped.

Doig writes in a style that is unapologetically quaint.  The climax of the novel, for instance, involves composing a “work song” that will unify the fractured classes of miners.  But even as the gruff drillers and diggers warble the sappy lyrics, it’s hard not to be drawn in by Doig’s sincerity.  Work Song is punctuated with humor and, despite the formality of its prose, the words rest lightly on the page.  It’s hard to keep a smile off your face as you’re working your way through this book.  Nostalgia has found a happy home here in Doig’s Montana literature.

Ivan Doig is currently on a book tour through Washington and Oregon; he’ll be at Village Books in Bellingham on July 20 (7 p.m.) and at Powell’s in Portland on July 23 (7 p.m.).

David Abrams’ short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Missouri Review, and The North Dakota Review, among other publications.  He is currently working on a novel loosely based on his experiences during the Iraq War, and his blog is The Quivering Pen.  He and his wife live in Butte, Montana.

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