Blue Heaven: A Novel

pretty good writing ..... love montana .... .so read it ....... good story

This is a prequal to Wyman's award winning "High Country" which tells us how a major character in that book, Fenton Pardee, got his start. In doing so it has to cover some territory already covered in "High Country," but it does so from a different perspective, the Montana land and culture taking over in ways it could not in the first book. Most notable about "Blue Heaven" is a West unromanticised, a West where people can come to grips with a new self as well as a new country. In its own way, the West is the protagonist here, shaping the people and giving them new life. Wyman's music transports us too, refrains we know from the swing era, sadness we know from the sentiments what wars bring to us. And they do. Movingly. It is not a small-gauge book. I think its aim is to show us where "the waters begin." And it does, vividly -- through the people who populate it.

If I hadn't already read Wyman's first novel "High Country", I would give "Blue Heaven" 4 or 5 stars. I read "High Country" and gave it 5 stars. It's a great book. This book which is the "pre-quile" to "High Country" but was written second, contains way too much of what is in "High Country". Wyman could have done better by coming up with some different adventures.

REMINDS ME OF MY BRO-IN LAW....ON A RANCH IN HAWAII IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. MADE THE HAIR ON MY NECK STAND UP

I really liked this book

In two books, High Country and Blue Heaven, Bill Wyman catches the essence of the Western experience. The West is about open country, and, above all, mountains. Western virtues spring from those mountains--courage, responsibility, independence, humility, and respect for the special skills of others (animals included)--but one must enter the mountains to learn the virtues. Uniquely placed to describe the wild country and what one learns there, Wyman himself knows how to pack a string of burros and live in the mountains from snow melt to snow fall. He is a gifted teacher who can articulate for others what can be found on a journey into the wild country.Blue Heaven begins in 1902, when young Fenton Pardee walks away from the wreck of a train carrying Bill Cody's Wild West show. It ends in 1940, when two young men who have worked with Fenton as packers and guides leave Montana to go to war. (The story takes place in and near the Continental Divide in northwest Montana; the nearest town for supplies and whisky is Missoula.) Ty Hardin, a quiet boy with a gift for handling animals, enlists in the Army; Special Hands, a clever boy, part Salish, part Cheyenne, joins the Marines.The gifts of the Western mountains and the fragility of those gifts hang on a line between these poles of Buffalo Bill and World War II: Will the skills and glamor of the West be packaged and turned to fakery, as in Cody's shows? Will the people who have mastered life in the mountains preserve their skills and wisdom when they leave the magnificent wilderness?Wyman also writes of life on the farms and in the towns of the region. Much of the social action of the novel revolves around a country school, where Cody Jo, raised in Virginia and educated in Massachusetts, shares her deep love of books, music, and learning. Contrasting and complementary action (much of it humorous), takes place at a favorite pleasure establishment in Missoula, the Bar of Justice.If Cody Jo illustrates the harmony between the West and literature and learning, her character also embodies a darker side of the West. Like many other characters in the novel, she has come to Montana to start her life over after a deeply painful event. The West is a good place to hide. For some characters, though--Native Americans and their children--the West is not the place for a second chance but rather the ground of their pain and dispossession. The role of missionary monks casts a deep shadow over some of the characters.The title of the book sums up the glory and the poignancy of the West. The West is indeed heaven: Imagine horses and riders and a pack string, all well breakfasted, all just feeling the warmth of a rising sun, as they cross a mountain meadow under a deep blue sky. Then imagine how easily that little bit of heaven can be lost. A person can know the heaven of the West and still feel a little blue. Wyman's account of Western life is rich, truthful and deeply moving.Mountain Lover from Oregon

In Blue Heaven, Willard Wyman has taken a look at the dimensions, now worn, of "the Western novel," and has seen how those conventions no longer could sustain what the West itself, in his time, had become. The old and true elements remain in place--the mixed beauties and cruelties of nature, the sheer difficulty of constructing lives where the terrain gives not an inch, the bravery and stoicism of men, the allure of women where few women sought to travel, the need of animals who bend only to rhythms they understand, and the sheer spaciousness of it all--but Wyman sees beyond what the conventions have given him. He takes what he finds in the Western writing he knows so well and he gives his reader a reborn world. It is of the West dying and the West finding new sources of being. In this touching and original novel, he shows how an older man, born in a West that had to die, finds security in love for both a woman and a young man he schools to carry on after him. And Wyman shows how the insularities of the West, no matter how big it could be, had at last to let in the East--with its wars, its finances, its politics and even its big city music. It is thus a novel about America itself coming of age, just as the young men of the West in Blue Heaven come of age and leave all they know to fight in a world war not of their making, but of the making of the country they at last had to join. In a novel at once short but piercing, Wyman tells us how one of our most fertile myths had to die, but how that myth still sustains our imagination.

"I should think this beautiful country would make these people want to write about it." So muses the teacher in the one-room school in "Blue Heaven." Willard Wyman has done just that: written about the world of packers who long to escape into the mountains and share the natural beauty with others. The result is a lovely and entertaining book that is devoid of the cliched conflict that often structures western novels. Instead, the tension that gives life to the book involves how a variety of people in back country Montana struggle to find meaning in their lives and understand their place in the natural world. Wyman creates a variety of memorable characters, most notably the teacher, Cody Jo, and the packers Fenton Pardee and Tommy Yellowtail. Wyman successfully conveys the mix of natural beauty and struggle to survive--the one intertwining with the other--that forms the romance of the high country. A great read!