Engrossing and moving. Often funny, and poignant.

It manages to be both a traditional western and a revisionist western at the same time, all without a single gunfight.

Like *Lonesome Dove*, it's an excellent novel that's hard to get people to read because they're probably prejudiced against anything with a cowboy hat on the cover. But that doesn't reduce its power as a work of literature. It's much smaller in scope and scale than Larry McMurtry's epic, but it has just as much to say, and says it as well. ( )

A year like this one anything you do is a mistake. Just being a rancher is a mistake. Only real difference I see between ranching and poker is, with poker you got some chance.

This is an age-old story of man against nature, man against man, and man against government; and Elmer Kelton tells it so well that you can feel that he has lived much of it in his own lifetime. There is a drought in West Texas, where Charlie Flagg owns a ranch and leases another large section of land to run cattle and sheep. Drought is not a new experience for Charlie, he has lived through the big drought of 1933, but this drought is to prove different, this one continues beyond the limits of memory and leaves few men standing in its wake.

It was a comforting sight, this country. It was an ageless land where the past was still a living thing and old voices still whispered, where the freshness of the pioneer time had not yet all faded, where a few of the old dreams were not yet dark and tarnish.

Charlie loves this land and he lives in the memories of the old days, when the line between right and wrong was less gray and more black and white. He is a bit of an anachronism, but that is because he still has the honor and dignity of the best of his generation. He pulls his own weight, and he doesn’t want a handout.

His son, Tom, has a young man’s view of life. He wants to make the rodeo circuit. He doesn’t understand his father’s brand of pride and principle, and he certainly fails to have his wisdom.

Tom Flagg said behind him, “I’d testify to anything for a free trip to Washington.” Charlie grumbled, “There’s damn little in this life that ever comes free. One way or another, you pay for what you get.”

Charlie’s hired man is Lupe Flores, who has lived in the house next door to Charlie’s, raised his large family, and managed the ranch, working alongside Charlie for years. Through Lupe, and his son, Manuel, we get a chance to look at Mexican-Anglo relationships and the fight a man like Charlie has between what is expected, which is to look down at the Mexican population, and what he truly feels, which is respect and a knowledge of how much he depends on this good man who works beside him.

To make things worse, the government programs that were promised as help for the farmers and ranchers in the region are proving to be a sand trap in themselves, and those who might have survived otherwise are being pulled down by them.

There was a time when we looked up to Uncle Sam; he was something to be proud of and respect. Now he’s turned into some kind of muddle-brained sugar daddy givin’ out goodies right and left in the hopes everybody is going to love him…It’s divided us into little selfish groups, snarlin’ and snappin’ at each other like hungry dogs, grabbin’ for what we can get and to hell with everybody else.

This book might be labeled as a “western”, but like so many great books, it is more than the label it is slapped with…it is a book about humanity, about struggle and about perseverance; it is a book about survival–it just happens to be set in the West.

My thanks to the Southern Literary Trail for making this our August selection and to Howard, whose remarkable review let me know that regardless of what I had planned, this book was not one I wanted to miss reading.

Howard’s Review ( )

Historically realistic in detail and in spirit of West Texas cattle ranching, so far as I can tell. I grew up there not a rancher but rather son of a Petroleum Engineer. To my recollection it did not rain in our town from 1950 to 1957. Without rain there is no pasturage for cattle to graze.

If you want an upbeat story, look elsewhere; that was a bad time for ranchers and others associated with the business.

The main character is stubborn and anti-government. Not an unusual combination by any means but not quite typical. Otherwise a representative view of range life from one who knew it well.

I must confess I appreciated Owen Wister's "The Virginian" more than this by Kelton, although this is slightly more realistic. Wister was the better writer, and Wister's is not only a good western but also good literature. (Little relation to the television series.) ( )

Set in West Texas, it's about a rancher struggling to hold onto his land and his livestock through a drought that lasts seven years. His love is cattle, but it's sheep that pays the bills- so quite a bit of this is about sheepherding and shearing time. When things start to get tough, he has to face the bitter choice of selling off some of his livestock, eventually even his sheep herd dwindles and he's forced to make some hard choices. Ranchers around him accept government assistance but Charlie Flagg resents the idea of "taking handouts" and refuses to sign up for the relief program, sticking it out on his own, whittling away his outfit, letting go his hired help. Tries to get his son, who is into rodeo and sees no value in the dried-up land, to come back and help him keep the ranch going, but that doesn't work out. Watches how others around him attempt to keep things afloat- some of their decisions turn out poorly, and others just barely help them squeak by. Like burning the spines off prickly pear to use it as livestock feed. I had forgotten entirely about the angora goats, so the ending was a surprise all over again to me, even though I did remember it had a hint of coming hope in the final pages. More about the land use and animal husbandry, it's also about the local politics in a small town, the financial issues in running the ranch, the uneasy relationship between landowners, Mexicans, and those recently come from across the border- frightened of being caught but desperate for work. I had also forgotten how much of this story is about the younger people, some chapters entirely told form the viewpoint of Charlie's son, his neighbor's daughter, or his foreman's oldest boy. It gave a good perspective on how things were changing as things shifted from the hands of the older generation into the new. The book gets a bit preachy sometimes with long ranting conversations, but I didn't mind, I was in the mood for a slow read.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

There's certainly something to be said for learning to appreciate an older style of writing. I labored with Dostoyevsky for example; I even had to work at loving Chekhov. But such adjusting periods usually pay off because the literature is so rich and beautiful and, for the writer, informative about the possibilities in craft.

I've labored long and hard with Elmer Kelton's The Time It Never Rained, because it is an historical novel rooted firmly in a particular culture, a particular era, a particular economy. It addresses issues of race and class, of politics, of environmentalism. It is a complex novel. But my problem with it is this: it takes too damned long to get itself underway, and the labor doesn't really pay off. Sure, the characters that start out as stolidly stereotypical do eventually develop distinct personalities, individual motives, a life outside the plot. But before Kelton can let these characters live and breathe on their own, he feels the need to utilize them toward some other Purpose, with a capital P: namely, he needs to take the time to explain to us, in textbook detail, the harsh mechanics of ranch life, the prejudices of every class of character, and -- most importantly -- his conservative, anti-government political slant. And he takes forever doing it.

I suppose that, given the beauty of the second half of the book, that wait might seem worth it. But here's my problem: While Elmer Kelton takes somewhere between 120 and 150 pages to set up the socio-economic realities of his novel, Jane Austen managed the same in the very first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. And I think if Kelton had sacrificed his research and his memoirs in favor of tightly crafted storytelling the way Austen did, this would have been a much, much finer novel.

That's not to say it is without beauty. Even early in the novel, Kelton's descriptions of the landscape are among the most beautiful passages I've read: "It was a comforting sight, this country. It was an ageless land where the past was still a living thing and old voices still whispered, where the freshness of the pioneer time had not yet all faded, where a few of the old dreams were not yet dark with tarnish. It had not been so long, really, since feathered Comanches had roamed these hills a-horseback, seeking after game, or occasionally in warpaint seeking honor and booty and blood. Eighty years . . . one man's lifetime." (One feels the lamenting echo of this romance in the latter pages of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, both set and written a generation after Kelton's novel.)

And once he gets the dry technical-manual-like explanations of ranch life out of the way, he winds up writing gloriously punchy, concise sentences about cowboying and sheepherding: "Diego climbed over the fence, rope in his hand, and dropped down inside the corral. He shook out a horse loop, moved carefully toward the colts, swung the rope in a quick figure eight and caught the bay around the neck." This quick, easy passage, letting necessary jargon slip in and out without any passing glance, is a far cry better than the full paragraph some 70 pages earlier in which Kelton carries on about the long historical whys and wherefores of putting a plate and glass in the kitchen sink. (I'm not exaggerating.)

Overall, though, the beautiful pastoral writing and the eventual development of the main characters -- especially Charlie Flagg and his Mexican ranch hand's son Manuel -- can't compete with the pervasive political bias of the novel, which asserts itself in long, awkward treatises and monologues or forced "arguments" between the dogged Flagg and basically everyone else in the book. I don't mind political content in a novel, especially if it serves the story, but in the case of this book, the servitude is reversed. In an afterward to the edition I read, Tarleton State University professor Tom Pilkington remarks that "it would be a mistake, I think, to read into the novel a particular political message -- that all government aid should be sternly and righteously rejected." But that precise message comprises at least half of Charlie Flagg's speech and thoughts in this book, and as Pilkington notes, Charlie Flagg is presented as a "a genuine hero," so his is the voice of the whole novel. And every single character save one who accepts government assistance and offers a counterpoint to Flagg's perspective does so in weak, circular, repetitive illogic, always resorting to either an "everyone else is doing it" or a greedy "get yours while the getting's good" position, and every one of them, by the end of the novel, comes to ruination and in one way or another "concedes" that Flagg was right all along. The lone hold-out, the only character to offer the thinnest attempt at a serious argument against the novel's pervasive anti-government stance, doesn't make his stand until barely 10 pages form the end, and the best he can muster is "the system's broken, but the idea's still good."

So I think it would be foolish to ignore the political message wedged into practically every page of this novel, and because the story and the characters become so servile to that message, it's hard to take this book seriously as a work of fiction.

I should say, though, that the problems with story aside, it's clear that Kelton is a damn fine writer; and in the end, despite Flagg's "heroic" efforts to resist government aid, the novel ends on a note as bleak and unforgiving as any I've seen, which is just the way I like my endings. So I would welcome a chance to read one of his less personal, less politically motived historical Westerns. ( )