Far as the Eye Can See
A Novel
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Bobby Hale is a Union veteran several times over. After the war, he sets his sights on California, but only makes it to Montana. As he stumbles around the West, from the Wyoming Territory to the Black Hills of the Dakotas, he finds meaning in the people he meets-settlers and native people-and the violent history he both participates in and witnesses. Far as the Eye Can See is the story of life in a place where every minute is an engagement in a kind of war of survival, and how two people-a white man and a mixed-race woman-in the midst of such majesty and violence can manage to find a pathway to their own humanity.
Robert Bausch is the distinguished author of a body of work that is lively and varied, but linked by a thoughtfully complicated masculinity and an uncommon empathy. The unique voice of Bobby Hale manages to evoke both Cormac McCarthy and Mark Twain, guiding readers into Indian country and the Plains Wars in a manner both historically true and contemporarily relevant, as thoughts of race and war occupy the national psyche.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As expansive as the country it traverses, Bausch's majestic odyssey through the Old West finds rich nuance in a history often oversimplified. After the Civil War, hardscrabble veteran Bobby Hale heads toward California only to find that rampant violence plagues both his dreams and the vast landscape unrolling before him. Learning that trouble is everywhere, he leads a wagon train along the Oregon Trail, spends five seasons as a trapper, then reluctantly puts his knowledge of the land to use scouting for U.S. forces intent on rounding up native tribes. On one mission, he attacks a native peace party under the mistaken belief that they are warriors, violating the codes of whites and natives alike. As he tries to reach his home base near Bozeman, Mont., without incurring retaliation from either side, his encounters with a mixed-race woman, a young Indian boy, and the battling forces at Little Big Horn transform him. The novel's patient, searching first-person narration is finely balanced, with a voice at once straightforward and lyrical, grand and particular. Bausch's (Almighty Me!) characters defy facile judgments; each is sharply distinctive, yet all struggle to find a footing amid the clash of human difference that is, in Bobby Hale's words, the "most spacious war of all."
