Q: What's your occupation?
    A: Cowhand, sheepherder; game poacher.

    Q: Where's your papers?...Your I.D.--draft card, social security, driver's license?
    A: Don't have none.  Don't need none.  I already know who I am.
 

Edward Abbey is one of the patron saints of the modern Environmental movement; right up there with Rachel Carson.  Desert Solitaire, his memoir of working in a National Park, is an impassioned statement of preservationist principles and his comic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is a virtual primer for ecoterrorism.  But my personal favorite of his books is the little remembered Brave Cowboy, the basis for the excellent but equally forgotten Kirk Douglas film, Lonely Are the Brave.  It belongs on the shelf with the other uniquely American paens to independence and rugged individualism:  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest(read Orrin's review), Cool Hand Luke, From Here to Eternity  (read Orrin's review), All the Pretty Horses  (read Orrin's review), etc.

Set in the mid 1950's, the novel tells the story of Jack Burns, a latter day cowboy, now reduced to working as a hand on a sheep ranch, who gets himself thrown into prison so that he can help his draft dodging friend escape.  But when his buddy refuses to compromise the moral purity of his concientious objector status, Burns is forced to break out on his own, assuming that a vicious Mexican prison guard he has aggravated doesn't kill him first.  In the meantime the authorities have realized that Jack too is unregistered and that while they were in college together, he helped his friend with some radical causes, however ineffectual.  So when he does manage to escape, Jack ends up being treated as a dangerous fugitive, instead of as the fairly harmless eccentric that he is.  Pursued by locals, feds, the military and the sadistic guard,  he takes off into the desert, his only allies a high spirited horse, who's as much trouble as help, and a phlegmatic local sherriff named Morlin Johnson.

In a broader sense though, what the book is really about is the clash between the values of the old West and the bureaucratic, mechanized, regimented and federalized modern West.  Though it lacks the memorable set-pieces that distinguish the other books cited above and is admittedly none too subtle in portraying the menace of modern life,  it succeeds nonetheless because the character of Jack Burns evokes such nostalgia in the reader and like Don Quixote, we find the mental world that he lives in more attractive than the reality that has begun to crowd in on him.  I like the novel very much and especially recommend the movie.

(Reviewed:21-Jan-00)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

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