The Whistling Season

I had always confused Ivan Doig with an early 19th Century writer, though I'm not sure why (or with whom). Perhaps there's a name similarity with someone I once read in school. In any case, his author picture in The Whistling Season does nothing to discourage this belief.

Nonetheless, The Whistling Season was first published in 2006, though it takes place in Montana of 1910 (yes, the year of Halley's Comet and Mark Twain's death). It's an interesting enough portrait of homesteading at the turn of the last century when Model Ts battled muddy roads for dominance, when dry land farming (You'd have to read this book a bit more carefully than I to fully understand that idea) slapped up against giant Government irrigation projects, and one-room school houses were the center of a community (like it or not).

The framing of The Whistling Season is weird and not really necessary, though at least we know everyone grows up well enough because our narrator pops in occasionally as an adult. But that's kind of the boring part.

The interesting part is the arrival of Rose Llewellyn and her intriguing brother Morrie Morgan to be--respectively--housekeeper and teacher. These two colorful characters have CON ARTISTS tattooed all over them, but they seem perfectly pleasant and interesting, intelligent and kind, and--having not read Doig before (stuffy old 18th century guy, right?), I wasn't sure if he was just playing with his reader.

Morrie is the best character in the book. He looks every bit the dandy--alarmingly stylish mustache, perfectly ironed white shirts--and is pleasantly overeducated, though only in a bookish way. As an example of what he lacks in education, his first job as wood cutter for a cranky old lady ends in him stacking three cords of wood with logs precisely four feet long (a cord, it was originally explained to him is "four feet high, four feet long and 8 feet wide"). To his credit, he did think it was an odd size for pieces of wood destined for a cookstove, and he does fix his mistake.Pressed into service, he becomes one of those teachers you dream of--teaching to a higher level of thinking while entertaining his charges.

In the end, lives change, are improved, or not, and some things about the prairie change and some things do not. I'm glad I gave this writer a chance to prove he lives in this century (or writes in it, anyway), though I'm not a convert.

I don't know if this is too cutesy, but I like the image it created. The youngest boy in the family is bursting to tell of the matrimonial escape of their former teacher: "Miss Trent loped!"

"Did she." Father's eyebrows lifed commensurately. "That must have been a memorable change from her usual gait."