Ashes of farmers’ dreams

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 19

Ashes of farmers’ dreams

The Battle of Pollocks Crossing. By J. L. Carr. Penguin, 1986. 176 pp. $8.79 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Alan Conway)

This novel, short-listed for the 1985 Booker Prize, is a little gem. It is the story of an exchange schoolteacher from Bradford, in England, who is given the opportunity in 1929 to teach at a high school in Palisades, South Dakota. His hopes of an exciting year fade rapidly when he arrives at Palisades, a god-forsaken town on the edge of nowhere surrounded by endless plains. The farmers, hard ’ hit by the Depression, are hanging on by their financial fingertips. He gets to know only two men really well. One is the local bank manager who is fascinated by everything English such as wanting to know why an umpire would wish to be buried in

his white coat with six pebbles in his hand. The other is the blind store keeper at Pollocks Crossing who has a billboard flapping in the wind informing anyone who cares that the nearest iced-water is 397 miles further on. These two men are killed by the trigger-happy police chief when a mob * surrounds the store at Pollocks . Crossing after a rumour gets abroad that the bank has failed. This darker . side of humanity, crushed by the times' and the environment, acts as a. counterpoint to the wry humour with which the author portrays the American scene. > This novel may not have the impact of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” but its outlandish description of the ashes of the American Dream on the farmers’ last frontier is excellent.