Book Corner – June 2017 (2)
Cabin Fever – B M Bower
If I hadn’t been so concerned about my mortality – yes, this is one of the 50, or rather, 150 masterpieces to read before you die – I wouldn’t have read this charming and impressive book. Bertha Sinclair (1871 – 1940) – B M Bower was her pseudonym – is not an author I had come across before and her genre – sort of Western – is not normally my bag. But, hey, it would be terrible to shuffle off this mortal coil having missed this gem.
Bud marries but soon after the birth of his child quarrels with his wife and leaves home. He gets a job as a driver but soon realises that the vehicle he is driving is stolen and that his passengers have carried out a jewellery heist. In the middle of the desert, he stops the car, ostensibly the check the tires but manages to disable the engine. The car won’t start again and Bud persuades his colleagues to let him go to the nearest town to summon assistance. When he gets to the town he alerts the cops to their whereabouts and sets off on his own to seek his fame and fortune. He hooks up with a prospector, but is beset with bouts of depression, going on alcoholic benders in the nearest town some 15 miles away.
It was as he was traipsing through the snow en route to the town that he came across a squaw carrying a child. He takes the child in and part of the book’s interest is in how the two hardened prospectors, who by this time couldn’t stand each other, take to sharing their Spartan accommodation with a lively and demanding infant. Marie, Bud’s wife, had been alerted to her errant husband’s whereabouts and sets out to find him. In a surprising twist to the story – I won’t spoil it – all the characters find happiness and find that they are linked with each other in ways that they, and the reader, hadn’t imagined.
Bower has a direct, unadorned style. She moves the story along with the minimum of fuss, spending enough time to develop her characters and to make them interesting enough to engender the right emotional reaction. There are moments of humour – she has a playful, light-hearted touch about her – and moments of pathos. Her turn of phrase and sentence construction make her prose a joy to read.
Perhaps it is a reflection of the time in which she wrote but many a critic thought her novels were the product of a man. Some couldn’t make their mind up and used gender-neutral pronouns. Not that the sex of the writer matters a jot, in my view, but she has a sharp observational style and is at ease exploring the psyche of her male and female characters. It was not what I expected, although I’m not sure what I expected, and despite the ups and downs that the main protagonists go through, has a feel-good feeling to it. It is well worth seeking out.
Filed under: Books, Culture Tagged: B M Bower, Bertha Sinclair, Cabin Fever, plot of Cabin Fever
