West is the debut novella from an established short story writer, and it feels like a debut novella from an established short story writer. Carys Davies' writing is stunning, and I love how sparse her writing is; each word she chooses is there to serve a purpose but she chooses each one with such skill that, although her style isn't flowery it is lyrical in its simplicity.

That being said, I finished this story wishing I'd gotten a little more from it. West is set in 19th century Pennsylvania, where widower Cy Bellman reads an article describing the large bones that have been found out west. Though there are no pictures in the article, Cy is so taken with the idea of creatures so big that he simply has to see them, so he leaves his ten year old daughter, Bess, with his sister and sets out on his quest, and while he deals with the dangers of his journey it appears that Bess isn't entirely safe without her father's protection, either.

There's a lot about this novella that I really liked. Cy's obsession with these bones and the descriptions of his fascination with them set West up to feel like a kind of 'fool's journey' story, in fact when Cy eventually finds himself being assisted on his quest by a First Nations boy West started giving me Don Quixote vibes. There's something about these bones, about these creatures no one's seen, that fills Cy with the most feeling he's had since the passing of his wife years before, and I loved how his behaviour could be read also as a man still dealing with grief and loss and perhaps even mental illness. There are mentions of him keeping everyone, including his daughter, at a distance for days at a time following his wife's death, which read to me like a man struggling through clinical depression in a time when no one understood what that was.

Having said that, I loved Bess and the sections of the novella about her a lot more. Cy and Bess were both well realised characters, but there was something about Bess that made her feel more substantial to me as a character. As her story went on she started to grow into a little human while Cy seemed to become less of a person and more of a parable of foolishness. That being said, Davies never mocks Cy or his desperation to see these creatures and know what they are. Other people he meets along the way might think he's crazy but Davies never does, and I appreciated that while his journey does become rather foolish Cy himself can never be completely described as a fool because so much of what he's doing is wrapped up in grief and a longing for something beyond himself.

While I loved Bess, though, there were aspects of her story that frustated me a little. I really liked the juxtaposition of her father facing the wilderness and Bess growing into womanhood in a world where men might try and take advantage of her with no father to keep her safe, but it feels like a story I've seen before and I didn't think Davies was really saying anything new. I don't want every story I read to be a lesson - stories can just be stories and be enjoyed as such - but this story is so short already that I thought it was a shame that so many of Bess's sections were taken up with scenarios I've seen before, particularly in historical fiction. There are two men in particular who have horrid intentions and, to Davies' credit, she never writes gratuitously about their desires, but she does write in a way that's unnerving and makes us genuinely worry for Bess's safety. Even so, the young girl without parents being pursued by bad men is something I've seen too many times before, and I thought it was frustrating that the aunt she's been left with is useless in this regard. I would have thought that Bess's aunt, more than anyone, would have been aware of the kind of things that might happen to Bess without her father there to protect her.

All that aside, this is a beautifully written piece of literary fiction and a melancholic exploration of the fool's journey and the consequences of that journey for 'the fool' himself and those around him. I look forward to seeing how Davies continues to develop as a writer, and if you're in the mood for something short and sweet with a Western Frontier vibe, I'd recommend giving West a go!

Cy Bellman, an American settler, leaves his daughter Bess in the care of her aunt Julie while he ventures West. In his pocket he keeps a newspaper clipping describing the excavation of enormous bones from a Kentucky swamp, belonging to a creature which has never been seen. Bellman, believing that these mammoth creatures may still exist, travels beyond the great frontier in search of them, a journey that he suspects will take him several years.
He carries glass beads and trinkets to trade with the Indians that he meets, and is eventually escorted by a young Indian who neither speaks or understands Bellman’s language.
In the years that Bellman is away from his daughter he writes her many letters, and after many setbacks he considers whether to give up his foolish adventure and return home to her. All the while he is unaware of the looming danger which threatens her at home.
~~~~.~~~~.~~~~
Carys Davies has a special type of magic. I have never read an author who is so sparse with words, but able to convey so much. While West could easily have been a sprawling epic, it’s beauty is that it is the complete opposite - only 149 pages, but it still manages to *feel* like an epic. She has written 2 collections of short stories and this is her first novel. And I bloody loved it!

How can such a short book have so much emotional impact? Carys Davis’ West comes in at a mere 160 pages and reading it, it feels as though she made use of every single word and employed each one of them in the exact right way for the book to deliver on what it aimed for. Each and every word is precise and impactful and turns these characters on pieces of paper into vivid human beings.
These people ring true thanks mostly to Davis’ examinations of perception - how people see things (or their relationships with other people) vs. how they actually are; and it is easy to see how these misinterpretations play a key role in both the characters’ arcs, and in real life. Julie thinks that Elmer is interested in her romantically; Bellman misreads the intentions of Old Woman from a Distance whilst continuously dismissing him, degrading him and taking advantage of him (whilst believing that he is doing nothing of the sort); and he believes, that far to the west, monsters roam.
It is interesting what the power of foresight has on the reader in relation to the goals of the characters, as we know right from the start that no monstrous figures, akin to dinosaurs or wooly mammoths, have existed in the mainland United States in the last - what? 60 million? years. So the reader knows, no matter how much Cy Bellman wants them to exist - or how much the reader, in turn, wants them to as well - that he will never achieve his goal of finding traces of them.
You would think it would be boring or tiresome to read the tale of a journey when you already are pretty certain of its conclusion, I certainly did before I began, but for Carys Davis’ West that is certainly not the case. For it is in the monotony of the days, the sprawling sense of the American west, and the inner workings of each character's mind where this novel is really told.
And I know it won’t be long before I buy myself a fancy hat and pick up this book again.

A sparse, dreamlike fable of westwardd expansion, rich with striking and unexpected images and sly humour, let down for me by the somewhat superficial and perfunctory treatment of sexual violence.

One word review: Masterful

Rambling review: Storytelling, truly immersive storytelling, is difficult at the best of times but Davies manages to capture Bellman’s story masterfully and concisely.

West is a deceptively short novel but one which paints a very vivid picture. She quickly enables the reader to become emotionally invested in both Bess and Cy. I particularly loved how she contrasted their relative freedoms and scope to carve their own choices.

As I think most readers will have done, I wanted to throttle Cy for abandoning Bess but also so desperately wanted his dream of chasing dinosaurs to be successful. Despite the reader knowing it is a doomed mission from the start, it is near impossible to not find yourself rooting for him.

The narrative did seem to jump slightly and could have benefitted from some additional composition. Sometimes that worked to her advantage - I love how the reader was left to speculate about Bess and Sydney’s falling out and fear the worst - but sometimes I found myself flicking back to check I hadn’t missed something. However, I am aware that I am reading a galley and that the version I read appears to be a couple of pages shorter than the finished version. Also, the “translation” from PDF to Kindle meant that the transition between voices and sections wasn’t as clear as it will be in final form.

P.S. I can’t wait to read more from this author.

-- blog post scheduled for thursday ---

Tightly written and highly effective coming of age and discovery novel. A great addition to the western genre

I first became aware of West from a rave review in The Sunday Times. Its editor Andrew Holgate said that he hadn't felt as strongly about a novel since Golden Hill, and given how much I enjoyed that wonderful book, I had to see if he was on the money again.

The action takes place in America of the early 19th century. In the opening chapter, Cy Bellman, a mule breeder, is saying goodbye to his young daughter Bess. He has read a newspaper article describing enormous bones discovered in Kentucky, and cannot rest until he sees these giant beasts for himself. He leaves Bess with his disapproving sister and sets off from his Pennsylvania home, promising to be back within two years. Bess pines for her father while he is away, watching out for his letters and imagining the wild adventures he is having. Cy's journey takes some unexpected turns and he endures his fair share of setbacks. There are times when he wonders if he made the right choice:
"You had so many ways of deciding which way to live your life. It made his head spin to think of them. It hurt his heart to think that he had decided on the wrong way."

It's a short book, just 160 pages long - minimal in style, yet epic in scope. We follow Cy's perilous journey across the great American plains, hoping against hope that it will prove fruitful. Yet there is an undercurrent of disquiet throughout, a sense that things won't end well. But I have one major problem with the story - I never truly believed that a poor, widowed rancher would leave his only daughter behind for such a reckless and foolish pursuit. The author never really convinced me of this.

The plot moves at a fair clip and it really speeds up in the last few chapters - I was flipping the pages in a frenzy to get to the end. Overall, West is entertaining, lyrical historical fiction. I did enjoy it and I do think it's worth reading, but the heavy praise has a me a little bemused.

2.5 to 3★
“Bellman loved this story, felt strengthened by it—the notion that whatever your own idea of the known world, there were always things outside it you hadn’t dreamed of.”

John Cyrus Bellman has a compulsion to go West to seek the big creatures he’s heard about in the news. He was captivated by the Lewis and Clark expedition and feels drawn to follow. He’s a farmer in the 1800s, a widower for many years with a ten-year-old daughter, Bess. The book opens with her begging her father not to leave her home alone with his sister, whom she doesn’t like very much.

Bellman make sympathetic noises and says he’ll be gone ‘only’ a year or so – two at the most. He is obsessed with his trip, pores over maps, explains to Bess and Julie where he’s going (west) and what he’s taking (trinkets) and what he hopes to finally find (dinosaurs). Well WE know they are dinosaur bones, but he just knows them as gigantic creatures. We don’t really know why he’s obsessed either.

He has rather casually informed his sister that she is to move into their house, on their farm, to look after Bess and the livestock. Elmer next door has been told to look in on them to help. Bellman tells Bess and his sister that if they must have cash, they can sell his wife’s wedding ring and the family clock on the wall. (At a later point in the book, Bess realises she can’t sell the clock without her aunt noticing it’s missing, but that’s just one of her many frustrations.)

The story weaves back and forth between Bellman on his journey of discovery and Beth growing up bored and lonely in a small town. She discovers the library because she wants to trace her father’s steps on a map, but the librarian is an unsavoury fellow.

Bellman meets up with a teenaged Indian, who acts as a guide, despite their having no common language. Bellman is fanciful in the extreme, and had the Indian not been a competent hunter, they would both have starved early in the piece.

There are some nice passages, and I believe the author has written good short stories. I might have enjoyed small sections of this in some sort of story form, but it seemed like an idea that was being padded out with a lot of generic western trapper-trader-explorer stories, and some didn’t ring true for me.

My mother was a real Lewis and Clark aficionado, and also collected ‘mountain man’ books, so I did grow up hearing about them. And I never heard of gorse before I went to New Zealand, so to have Bellman and the Indian throwing their clothes over gorse bushes to dry sounded odd, so I looked it up.

It seems gorse was brought from Europe to the east coast of America as a garden hedging plant in the 1800s, but only to the coasts. I haven’t found anything to suggest it was anywhere near where our wild-eyed adventurer was. That’s just one particular example of the many places in the story that were either inaccurate, inconsistent, or unlikely, so I nearly didn’t finish it.

But when it was appropriate, I enjoyed the author’s imagination. Desperate for her father to come home, Bess thinks of him every day and night.

“In the darkness and the quiet Bess could hear the ticking of the wall clock. When she closed her eyes she still saw a picture of what the clock looked like after her father had ridden away—when she’d turned at last to go back into the house, it had its arms flung out across its big round face, one pointing one way and one in the opposite direction, as if one hand was pointing west and the other east. In daylight, there was a different time she liked more than any other and she did everything she could to be in the house when it arrived: the time when the bigger of the two hands crept slowly through the 12 until it joined the smaller one, both of them pointing east.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Granta Publications for the copy for review from which I’ve quoted. I’m sure a reader who's less of a fuss-pot will enjoy the characters and the premise. Meanwhile, maybe an editor might fix the inconsistencies in tenses, as well.

This is a short novel to read and I appreciated that as it was an engaging quick read. The concept of the story was fascinating, which reminded me that ther was a time when the whole world seemed new. Engaging characters and a vivid depiction of the differing locations made this an enjoyable read.

4.5*

Carys Davies’s debut novel West is a work of historical fiction set on the American frontier in the early 19th Century. John Cyrus Bellman, a thirty-five year old widower and mule breeder, reads about sensational discoveries of fossils in Kentucky and, for the first time since the death of his wife, his imagination is fired up. He feels that he has found his calling – that of travelling West in a bid to see the bones for himself, and possibly trace the giant creatures which might still be roaming deep in uncharted territory. The scepticism of friends and relatives does not deter him, and he leaves upon this quest, even though this means leaving his beloved daughter Bess behind him, in the care of his sister. Thus the novel unfolds, alternating between an account of John’s voyage and a description of Bess’s journey into adulthood.

Carys Davies has published two collections of short stories and she brings to a larger canvas the pithiness and conciseness which characterize the best short-story writers. At 160 pages, West might be better described as a novella, and yet it often has the epic feel of a much longer novel. It is a “western” in the best sense of the word, evoking the vast open spaces of an unknown America ripe for discovery. But it is also an intimate and poetic work, as the third person narration delves into the innermost thoughts of Bess, John and, at a later stage, the young Native American who accompanies John on his journey. The fable-like simplicity of the novel’s language does hinder it from facing big issues head-on – endings, beginnings and survivals; fate, faith and the nature of belief; personal and collective memory. West is a quick read but I suspect that its images will long resonate in my mind.

I finished this very short novel wanting more but realising that it had said it all already. An insubstantial story, really, but some striking themes (the outstanding one being grief - for a wife, a family and a nation) and images of an America with vast areas still to be explored. Cy’s need to find something wonderful in his life, effectively abandoning the most wonderful thing he already has, his daughter, and his eventual realisation of this, has a deeper poignancy than I’d expected. I was very struck, too, with his relationship with his young Native American guide and the way it developed over the months from mutual ambivalence to, if not outright affection, a kind of accommodation despite their lack of a common language.

A real treat to read and it has prompted me to seek out her collections of short stories as soon as I can. Highly recommended.

This book was, for me a very fast read, it's a short book with a big punch.

It tells the story of Cy Bellmann, a pioneering Brit who has previously emigrated to Pennsylvania to farm mules and horses, this act alone tells us he is man not averse to taking a great risk to achieve what he wants in life even if it is to the cost of those dear to him, you'd think he'd be satisfied with what he has! Now widowed and left alone with just his young daughter Bess who is now 10, for company, like many of us, he knows there must be something greater than his humdrum life.

He's only 35 but boy does this guy have a sudden mid life crisis. He hears news of a momentous discovery far away in Kentucky, a pile of colossal animal bones. He is convinced this skeleton reveals the presence of a yet undiscovered wondrous living creature and it ignites a fire in him he hasn't felt since before his wife died, he burns to be the one to find this huge animal.

Talk about throwing caution to the wind - he buys a new hat and overcoat, clambers on a horse and sets off in a Westerly direction, abandoning his only daughter to the not so tender ministration of his curmudgeonly spinster sister Julie telling her vaguely he may be back in a couple of years.

The book in turns follows his trail throughout the wild and inhospitable West as he follows his unlikely and foolhardy quest. Then it follows Bess as she matures without the love of a parent, and spends time at the library trying to follow his likely progress on maps.

The book is sparse without much of the embroidery and detail which often fills works of pioneers on a great journey yet it paints a starkly beautiful image of a land so vast that it is indeed possible creatures could be hiding and never have been seen in living memory. Cy encounters Native Indians and gets himself a travel companion/guide, a young American Indian lad with a wonderful tongue in cheek name, who speaks not a word of English.

Meanwhile whilst he is away, Bess grows older and begins to attract very unwelcome attention of the wrong sort and her Aunt who barely even acknowledges her is no protector.

This is a simple tale of how grief coupled with a deep yearning can cause us to lose sight of the treasures we already have, in the never ending quest for "there must be more than this".

It is also about seeking atonement and mentally punishing oneself for past deeds, whilst telling oneself that it is for the greater good that one makes decisions and not for self gratification.

It is a delectably enjoyable book and is almost allegorical in its nature with the extinct species at the heart of the tale continuing to have an impact over the years, how grief manifests itself as guilt and no matter how deeply buried the skeletons are they eventually rise to the surface, and the moral that even if there is something bigger than us out there it doesn't necessarily follow that it is what we need for our own survival.

The ending is satisfying and the path to reach it is a terrible and awesome journey of deprivation and dogged determination. A lovely little fable with great characters.