Top 5 Edward Abbey Books

Anyone reading this blog who has heard of Edward Abbey will probably know him for one thing: he wrote the book The Monkey Wrench Gang and so gave rise to the environmental group Earth First!

However, there's a lot more to Abbey than just the guy who invented monkey wrenching, and a lot more to read by him than just the Monkey Wrench Gang, although that is very much worth reading. In fact, Abbey is not only my favourite author from what we can broadly call the American Right, he's one of my favourite nature authors from the New World. Considering the country has produced Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Grey Owl and Aldo Leopold that's high praise. And, yes, I do know Muir was born in Scotland and that Grey Owl was actually a bloke called Archie from Hastings!

1. The Brave Cowboy (1956)

Abbey's first real novel, and his best. To people who come to Abbey via The Monkey Wrench Gang this novel explains exactly where he is coming from. The book is a 'modern' Western, although the term is a little strange as it was written more than sixty years ago, meaning the novel is set nearer in time to the real Old West than the present day. Abbey is not a part of the environmental movement, but he was intimately connected to what was once the American Frontier, especially the deserts of the southwest.

The hero of the book, John W 'Jack' Burns is a cowboy loner who scrapes a living herding sheep. He lives simply in the desert, cutting fences and refusing to carry any form of identification. When his friend Paul Bondi, a more conventional kind of anarchist, is arrested for refusing the draft, Burns has the cunning plan of getting himself arrested so he can bust them both out of jail. Bondi, quite sensibly, decides this plan is mad, so Burns has to make his escape on his own, pursued by the police and the US Air Force. The mountains are a challenge he and his horse can deal with, but the four-lane freeway is not.

The novel is taunter than The Monkey Wrench Gang. The single protagonist, and the struggle against modernity being reduced to one man and his horse against the system, makes it a better story. I think it's the best thing Abbey ever wrote. It's also the only Abbey book to be mad into a film. Called Lonely Are The Brave it starred Kirk Douglas's chin as Jack Burns, and is apparently one of the actor's favourite movies. Considering what else he's been in that's quite a compliment.

2. Fire On The Mountain (1962)

Abbey is of the American Right. However, whilst the likes of John Wayne saw no contradiction between the Western frontiersman defending his home, and the Green Beret torching those of the Vietnamese, Abbey did. His nearest literary contemporary was the sci-fi writer Bob Heinlein. If The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress had been set in Utah rather than space it could have been an Edward Abbey book. However, for Heinlein, the US government could do no wrong. For Abbey it could, and usually did. Fire on the Mountain is interesting because it is about the confrontation between two American institutions that other Right Wing writers praise equally with no contradiction: the frontier rancher and the US Air Force.

The plot is paper thin, and the ending downbeat, which makes it the weakest novel on this list. It is enhanced slightly by the plot device of the story being told through the eyes of a child, and somewhat more substantially by Abbey's exploration of the issues raised, and his peerless description of the natural beauty of the American southwestern. To most people's eyes the desert where the hero makes his home is a poor place to live, and the city where the USAF wants him to move to is a paradise, but in Abbey's accomplished hands this paradigm is reversed. This is the worst book in this list, but still worth reading.

3. Desert Solitaire (1968)

As you've probably seen by now, Abbey's chief virtue is his ability to write about the desert of the American southwest in mythic terms. He almost doesn't need a plot for his stories. This theorem is proved by his best non-fiction work, Desert Solitaire. Using incidents in his life whilst working for the National Park Service in the fifties, Abbey describes rivers, deserts, plants, animals and visitors to the Arches National Park where he worked. The result is some of the most beautiful nature writing in American literature, and a warning of the erosion of the wilderness by humans. 

The longest chapter concerns a journey down the Glen Canyon shortly before it was plugged by the Glen Canyon Dam. This monstrosity has a special place in US environmental history. In the early 1950s David Brower and the Sierra Club fought desperately against the construction of dams at Echo Park and Glen Canyon. They won against the battle against the first and thought they'd won a major success, until they actually had a look at Glen Canyon. Brower, who would subsequently found Friends of the Earth, was told "Echo doesn't hold a candle to Glen Canyon", and Abbey would agree. The damn appears in several of his subsequent books and the monkey wrench gang spend some time trying to figure out how to destroy it. Which, of course, brings us onto that book.

4. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

So, this is it, the one people have heard of, the story that gave us 'monkey wrenching' and started Earth First! What's it like as a book?

Well, it's a bit flabby. There's no real plan to what the Gang do, and no real antagonists that they're up against, apart from some fairly lightweight local vigilantes. However, as a guide to how to take radical direct action it's pretty good. A better question though is who the Monkey Wrench Gang are. They are an odd bunch.

First, you have Doc Sarvis, a surgeon by day, and arsonist by night, who at the start of the story is burning down the billboards that screen the freeway from the desert. His money bankrolls the gang, and he also provides the moral compass, insisting that no-one is killed or injured. Sarvis only just counts as an intellectual, but even so he's an unusual character for an Abbey novel. However, he's no fan of technology, being unable to even drive.

Next, there's Bonnie Abbzug, who's even less of a typical Abbey creation. Firstly, she's female, and secondly, she's a complete hippy. She's also in a relationship with Doc, even though he's more than two decades older. You suspect there's a bit of wish fulfilment here, but her role in the quartet is to be the foil to the men, who usually ignore what she has to say. You can't really argue Abbey was a feminist.

Then there's Seldom Seen Smith, the only proper local. A 'Jack' Mormon, Seldom Seen is the outdoorsman of the party. His survival skills keep the gang alive, and he is also the one who most often waxes poetic about the beauty of the desert. In this respect he is speaking in the author's voice.

Finally, there's George Washington Hayduke. He not only has a patriotic name, he's done his patriotic duty and served in Vietnam with the Green Berets. It's Hayduke's military skills that the gang use in their sabotage missions, but, he's no John Wayne. Captured by the enemy in Vietnam, Hayduke goes native and takes their side, an American Viet Cong. Bob Henlein might write about lunar colonists acting like the Viet Cong, but only Abbey wrote about one of America's own becoming one. Hayduke, alone amongst the gang, is based on a real person, Abbey's friend Doug Peacock, a man who, after serving as a special forces medic in Vietnam, turned his back on human beings and took to hanging out in the woods with grizzly bears.

The gangs rampage around the desert is fairly random, and they attack road construction equipment, mining gear and any bulldozer they find. They are helped by the fact that all the plant they come across is unlocked and unguarded. If only real ecotage was so easy! The beauty of the American Southwest is vividly described, of course, but this is no sermon on saving the planet. The book spends a lot more time on how the gang carry out their sabotage than the why. This is even more apparent at the end, when some of the gang are caught and dragged before the authorities. You'd expect some dramatic courtroom showdown, in which the folly of trashing the wilderness is brutally described. Instead, the gang plead the fifth, deny everything, and plea bargain their way to minimum sentences. This is not the Gandhi way.

This novel can be a bit hard to understand then if you are expecting a Walden or a Silent Spring. However, it's more explicable of you see the Robert Crumb illustrations, like the one above. This book is, at heart, a Western, only a Western were the outlaws are the heroes.

5. Hayduke Lives! (1990)

Four years after the Monkey Wrench Gang, a disillusioned former executive of the Sierra Club, called George Forman, broke away from the mainstream environment movement to form the radical environmental group Earth First!. Like the monkey wrench gang, Earth First! would carry out acts of covert ecotage. Like the gang, they would deny everything if caught. In due course Earth First! would evolve and spread around the world, becoming in the process more liberal in its attitudes and broader in its tactics, but in the early days it was very much in Abbey's image. Their official motto was "Back to the Pleistocene". Their unofficial motto was "Rednecks for wilderness".

Abbey was a hero of the group, and a regular at their yearly Rendezvous. However, as his involvement in activism grew, his writing diminished. But he wasn't done yet, either with books or the gang. In 1990 the foursome returned, in the sequel Hayduke Lives!

Sequels to great books are usually disappointments, but surprisingly, Hayduke Lives! isn't. In many ways it's actually better than the original. The plot is a lot tighter, for a start, and unlike the scattergun approach of the first book, there is a single antagonist - the giant drag chain digger called the GEM that is coming to despoil the desert.

Perhaps what's more interesting is the characters that pop up in the book. As well as the return of the gang, an unnamed cowboy turns up to help them, who is almost certainly Burns from Brave Cowboy. There is also an appearance by the real Earth First!, mostly in the form of fictional representatives of the real organisation, although EF! founder Dave Foreman has a cameo. They are peripheral to the main plot, but it's clear from the way they are written that Abbey really loves his children. It's fortunate perhaps that they are so peripheral, as they are so god-like in their beauty and bravery that they would have unbalance the book. There is also, at the very end, a cameo by a real environmentalist. I won't spoil the surprise, but you can probably guess their name. Unfortunately, along the way, Abbey commits the only unpardonable sin of his career.

Amongst the scenes in the book is a visit to an Earth First! Rendezvous. Bernie Mushkin, a blowhard who calls the Earth First!ers fascists, before getting into his car and heading back east. Mushkin was a caricature of Murray Bookchin, whose theory of social ecology connected the destruction of the environment to the oppression of humans. Bookchin could be a pretty combative character, and in criticising some of the more misanthropic aspects of Earth First! Bookchin had called Dave Foreman "a patently anti-humanist and macho mountain man" pedalling "a crude eco-brutalism".

The real Bookchin, though, was nothing like Munchkin, the East Coast corporate environmentalist more at home in committee rooms of Washington DC than the forests of Washington State. He'd grown up in the Bronx, the son of Jewish immigrants, and his European family had all been exterminated by the Nazis. He'd first earnt his activist credentials as a union organiser in a car factory. However, despite his urban upbringing, he was a keen trail walker and was almost as at home in the wilderness as Abbey. 

A few months before Hayduke Lives! came out, Bookchin had had a debate with Dave Foreman. It turned out they had more in common with each other than differences, and Bookchin was able to say he stands "shoulder to shoulder with everyone in Earth First! who is trying to save the wilderness". However, by 1990, it was far from clear if Earth First! stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreman and Abbey. The racism and sexism of the 'rednecks for wilderness' was being challenged by younger activists, and the frontier libertarianism was being replaced by proper anarchist thinking. The late Judi Bari, who was being blown up by a bomb planted either by, or with the connivance of, the FBI at about the time the book came out said that Earth First! wasn't just a bunch of monkey wrenchers but "a social change movement". The world had moved on and Abbey had become a bit of a dinosaur.

But then Abbey had never really fitted in to anyone's politics. He was encouraging people to burn their draft cards nearly two decades before the Vietnam War. He would throw beer cans out of his car as he drove along, arguing that the road had already destroyed the wilderness. He said racist things about Mexicans, but suggetsed that each deported illegal be given a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition, in the hope that they would overthrown the oppressive governments they were fleeing. 

Hayduke Lives! was his last work, published after he'd gone the way of the dinosaurs. By the time it was published his friends had buried his body in the arizona desert, so he could become part of the wilderness he loved. He was man who loved the vanishing American frontier for what it really was, not what people made it, and he wrote about it in a way few others had managed. 

If you haven't read one of his books yet, then please do so.