Here is the tale of the uncertainties of friendship and love here are sheep-shearing contests and raucous dances in one-room schoolhouses here are brutal winters and unrelenting battles of the will here is a love of delightful and heartbreaking intensity, and another love, born of heartbreak, of an equally moving and stoical devotion. When we meet Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay-emigrants, 'both of us nineteen and green as the cheese of the moon and trying our double-damnedest not to show it'-they are setting off for a new life in a new land, in America, in Montana, 'those words with their ends open.' We follow their fortunes in the Two Medicine country at the base of the Rocky Mountains: the building of homes and the raising of families, making a living and making a life. Their melancholy dance of life is rendered with exquisite nuance.Doig wrote this novel after English Creek as part of his McCaskill trilogy-which also includes Ride with Me, Mariah Montana-but read Dancing at the Rascal Fair first).įrom its opening on the quays of a Scottish port in 1889 to its close on a windswept Montana homestead three decades later, this novel is a passionate and authentic chronicle of the American experience. His characters are not the morality-play heroes of the genre Western, but real people, tangled in their feelings, handicapped by their deficiencies, deeply decent, yearning for closeness, finding it only intermittently. From its opening on the quays of a Scottish port in 1889 to its close on a windswept Montana homestead three decades later, this novel is a passionate and authentic chronicle. Ivan Doig's supple tale of landseekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the. His greatest strength is exploring the coagulated feelings of human beings within the family. Doig wrote this novel after English Creek as part of his McCaskill trilogywhich also includes Ride with Me, Mariah Montanabut read Dancing at the Rascal Fair first). The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Most painfully, it turns his son against him.ĭoig makes these losses seem not exceptional but the human condition, and the way we cope with them the fabric of what we are. It turns his lifelong friend Rob into an enemy.

But he never stops longing for his first sweetheart, and that passion sours his life.

Angus falls in love with a young woman-the depiction of his rapture is the great charm of the novel-but she choses another.Īngus proceeds. Homestead life proves to be hard-physically, economically, especially emotionally.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig