The Brave Cowboy

It was one of Edward Abbey's regrets that he was appreciated more for his nature writing ("Desert Solitaire") than his fiction. And it was another regret that he was mostly forgotten as the author of the story on which the movie "Lonely are the Brave" was based. However, after reading "The Brave Cowboy," I'd have to vote with those who find his nonfiction far more inspiring and satisfying. It's a novel that still rewards the reading, but almost 50 years after its publication in 1956, it seems somewhat dated, while "Desert Solitaire" remains as fresh and relevant as if it were written yesterday.

Abbey was still in his twenties when he wrote this novel, and its point of view is that of a young man full contradictory passions and attitudes. The brave cowboy of the title, a prototypical figure on horseback, is the central character in maybe half the pages of the novel. A younger college friend, imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft, is another character. The local sheriff gets a large section to himself. The novel also follows the progress of a long-haul truck driver across the country. The lives of these four characters intersect in the narrative, while each of them also represents a different perspective. And they don't all quite converge in a single point of view. But that was Abbey, an outspoken man who wasn't afraid to contradict himself.

To its credit, the novel can be read on more than one level. It uses the cowboy to represent free-spirited, libertarian ideas set in conflict with brute ignorance and repression. It decries urbanization and celebrates the limitless, stark beauty of the mountains and desert (the novel is set in northern New Mexico). It's also a prison drama, and it tells a satirical yet gripping story of heavily armed but mostly inept law officers in pursuit of a fugitive. A reader interested in a 1950s view of the West and its people in post-war transition will find much to enjoy in Abbey's youthful book about a mythic cowboy's adventure and the lives it disrupts.

As a companion volume, I'd also recommend James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky," which tells a similar story about a cowboy pursued across a Western landscape by the law.

When Jack Burns encounters a barbed-wire fence as he comes across the West Mesa (Albuquerque)on horseback he scans in both directions for a gate before he clips the wire to ride through. He wouldn't have cut it if it wasn't in his way, or if there'd been a gate nearby. Thus begins the book with a scene that tells much about the main character.
Burns is a man who doesn't merely cling to ideals of loyalty, privacy and individual freedom. His internal machinery accepts no alternative at any level. Jack Burns is a man who won't cut a fence unless it stands in the way of where he wants to go. He recognizes the existence of the creeping encroachments and compromises to his choices and ignores them. The modern acquiescence by the rest of society is foreign to him.
Burns descends the mesa into Albuquerque, encounters modern city life and is battered by it without 'losing' in the usual sense of the word, and leaves on the run from the legal instruments intended to keep us all on the straight and narrow. The end is inevitable.
Readers who know Albuquerque will enjoy the ride across the 'Volcans', the places in the Rio Grande Valley still recognizable despite the years since Abbey wrote the book, the harrowing climb up the Sandias pursued by the military and law enforcement community. Those who don't know Albuquerque or New Mexico will appreciate the type of individual Burns portrays: a man born too late, unable to compromise.
I haven't seen the movie mentioned by other reviewers. I also didn't see the shortcomings of the book mentioned by several. I saw only a writer who created a character much as Abbey saw himself, as many people today see themselves, and a plot that carried those traits through to the end. No one, I imagine Abbey would say, can dodge the steamroller.

While other reviews will give you a plot synopsis and their reaction to the book, or a comparison with the movie, "Lonely Are The Brave," I will limit my review to a few off the wall observations. First, I liked this book a lot and believe the adaptation by Dalton Trumbo to be one of the most faithful by any screenwriter. Often it is difficult not to think of the movie a book is based on while reading it (if you've seen the movie first). But Abbey is so good he made me forget I'd seen the movie and allowed me to lose myself in his words and story. So, a great book, well written, that didn't back away from some of the political hot potatoes most writers and publishers would rather avoid (draft dodging, property rights, etc.).

Few books have made me cry at the end -- usually it's when I think of the time and money wasted on them. This one left me in tears because of a profound sense of loss of another kind, the loss of men such as John W. Burns, the loss of the maverick, the loss of a true voice of the west, and the loss of a west that we will never know except through books and movies.

But one thing impressed me as much as the contents of the book -- its binding. Rarely does anyone discuss this, but I have to say that this edition is the best bound I've ever read. The spine was not stiff and the pages were very flexible allowing me to read one handed almost anywhere. If all paperbacks used this same binding, I wouldn't have to replace my often-read books every eight or nine years. So, from this perspective, the publisher is allowing Abbey's work a much longer life in one edition. Possibly a tribute to Abbey's philosophy, or merely a coincidence, either way I remain impressed by this. This may be the only paperback I own that I can pass to my grandson, as is, for his enjoyment in the future.

Edward Abbey's first-best book is, of course, "Desert Solitaire," that fictionalized non-fiction work that so eloquently celebrates the pristine Southwest wilderness and mourns its destruction at the hands of industry and politics.

"The Brave Cowboy" is known to many through its filmization with Kirk Douglas. Despite the inane title, "Lonely Are the Brave," it is an excellent movie. But the book is even more excellent.

If you see this work purely as social commentary -- the individual at odds with society -- you miss the point. That aspect of the book, while it is an impassioned message from one of this country's best nature writers, is almost too obvious to deserve mention. The message -- and the beautifully detailed setting of Western plains and mountains -- is the background.

The foreground is a character study of Jack Burns, a man in perpetual rebellion against authority and incapable of commitment to anything outside of himself. He is generous and caring, but he allows no one to penetrate his stubborn exterior. He refuses to be vulnerable to love or to any of the normal compromises that permit even the most hardened of us individualists to survive in the real world.

He is inevitably doomed by his own intransigence, and that is what makes the story more than just "sad": it is a genuine tragedy. And like all successful tragedies, it is uplifting. The book's triumph is that, even while we know the outcome, we envy Jack Burns.

This book is a youthful work. You won't find a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald in the writing style, or even a Jack London. It is a popular book, more like a best-seller than "literature." Nevertheless, the excellence of its story raises it above the main. It is simply a great, and greatly affecting, read.

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.
GRADE: B+

In Brave Cowboy, Abbey captures the spirit of an antiquated cowboy born in the wrong century, bouncing around the desert of the southwest like tumbleweed; making his way the only way he knows how. Although set in the mid-twentieth century, the tight plot and character relationships are reminiscent of a western of a hundred years earlier. As expected, Abbey's prose and distinctive description did not disappoint as the story coalesces around the cowboy, his grievances with government, and his loyalty to a friend. The climax of the story takes the reader on a chase that ends abruptly and unexpectedly, I thought. With this story, I believe Abbey illustrated the constant struggle between progress, growth, and those who oppose it.

Edward Abbey's writing style is wonderful, as is his plot and character development. It is my understanding that, while his style, prose, and themes remain constant throughout his career, his talent is polished and refined with each novel. Brave Cowboy, being his first widely published fictional work, leaves the reader with a taste of things to come in his later writings.

This is a novel about a man born into the wrong era. Jack Burns is a cowboy through and through--unaccustomed to having his freedom restricted and driven by a strong sense of loyalty and honor. The problem is he lives in post World War II America, and his old-fashioned values and desire to roam the country freely often clash with the modern society in which he lives. This causes many problems for Burns, some simple, some complicated: he has a hard time getting his horse to cross the highway, people don't respect him, he doesn't register for the draft (which was compulsory then). He is put in jail trying to help a friend, and it is here that the conflict of old and new really begins to unfold.

Without revealing too much of the plot, Burns tries to beat modern society with his old-fashioned ways. The final section of the book deals with the physical conflict between old and new, between horse and horsepower, and it is clear that Jack Burns simply does not belong in the era into which he was born. This novel details the struggle for disappearing values, the desperate attempt to hold on to the past (and the consequences this sometimes brings). Edward Abbey is an excellent writer, and his prose is vivid and descriptive. The Brave Cowboy is a classic work of American Western fiction.

I liked Edward Abbey long before I read his work as I saw the movie adaptation of this book "Lonely Are The Brave" back in the Sixties. Abbey’s protagonist, Jack Burns, the uncompromising rebel from another America, is as free spirited as his creator. Constantly at odds with modern life, he eventally violates enough of its ways to become sought by the law. Hunted relentlessly he chooses to stay with his horse and chance his escape across rugged mountains rather than abandoning him and fleeing on foot.... Burns is not your typical cowboy hero; he is a reminder that the individual is sometimes far grander than the shackles he creates by the imposed rules of society.

After reading "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and his opus "A Fool's Progress", I was let down by this particular Abbey effort. The cliched character of Burns, the beleaguered cowboy, riding out of the purple-hazed past to rescue an old buddy from the perils of modern times, is shopworn at best. Abbey's prose, usually spectacular, just doesn't seem up to his standards here. Missing, too, were the pyrotechnic polemics that make Abbey so much fun to read. The ending was so thoroughly telegraphed, I felt slightly insulted. Avoid this book, and read "A Fool's Progress", Abbey at his finest.

I remember the movie with Kirk Douglas and had hopes the book would surpass the movie. It didn't. I'm an Abbey fan, but this story is not up to par, clearly a very early work of a developing writer. Stick with Monkey Wrench or Desert Solitaire for the true Abbey experience.