Edward Abbey (1927–1989)

There is no doubt that this is a terrifically exciting adventure novel: the chase and escape scenes are so intense it is incredible that Hollywood has not yet made the film. Hayduke's disappearing acts are outrageous. The eco-sabotage plot is 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' on acid.

But as I reread it I'm struck by its literary qualities too.

The metaphors are fresh: a boulder levered down a mountainside bounces from ledge to ledge like a jackrabbit. "Great blue herons once descended, light as show more mosquitoes, long legs dangling, to the sandbars." Just the right choice of similes.

The writing creates so many different tones: pastoral, profound, ironic, cutting, sometimes in immediate and absurdist counterpoint: "... While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see."

The presentation of the landscape comes from deep knowledge: this is no research-project novel but one of real familiarity with its desert setting and the human society there. Who but somebody who knew their patch of nature implicitly would imagine a depiction of animals such as this: "One thin scream came floating down, like a feather, from the silver-clouded sky. Hawk. Redtail, solitaire, one hawk passing far above the red reef, above the waves of Triassic sandstone, with a live snake clutched in its talons. The snake wriggled, casually, as it was borne away to a different world. Lunchtime."

The characters are described in glorious colour, even the supporting roles: our protagonists' enemy, the Mormon Bishop Love, is bishop “on Sundays and Wednesday church-study nights only. Rest of the time he’s neck deep in real estate, uranium, cattle, oil, gas, tourism, most anything that smells like money. That man can hear a dollar bill drop on a shag rug. Now he’s running for the state legislature. We got plenty like him in Utah. They run things. They run things as best they can for God and Jesus, and what them two don’t want why fellas like Bishop Love pick up."

It conjures personalities that feel original and distinctive, that stand out from the society around them and have their individual points of view: "'You can never go wrong cuttin' fence,' repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) 'Always cut fence. That's the law west of the 100th meridian. East of that don't matter none. Back there it's all lost anyhow. But west, we cut fence.'"

It is a novel of depth of feeling expressing itself in uncompromising bluntness: behind the great damnation, the Glen Canyon Dam, lies "Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon."

It punctures American pretensions without compunction: "“What’s more American than violence?” Hayduke wanted to know. “Violence, it’s as American as pizza pie.” “Chop suey,” said Bonnie. “Chile con carne.” “Bagels and lox.”"

All this excitement, character, humour, irony, poignancy, knowledge compressed into a thrilling adventure story: that's why it's my favourite novel.

P.S. Two women blogged and photographed their epic hike through and between the national parks in the canyonlands in honour of Hayduke: https://hayduketrail.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/ show less

2026-04-25

Edward Abbey joins some of the authors I most admire (Annie Dillard, Peter Mathiessen, Loren Eiseley) in one of my favorite groups- superb writers who have discovered that their experience of immersion in the natural world is the source of deep, if always shifting and elusive, meaning – perhaps the only meaning, the only kind of meaning.

I didn’t rush to read the man because an egotistical and misogynistic crank persona outlived him, but that’s little in evidence (maybe it hadn’t been show more fully developed yet) here. It is true that there’s no inkling of female subjectivity in this book – the perceivers and doers, for good or ill, are all male, and whenever he addresses a larger audience, the receivers are all imagined to be male too. Very old school. But what Auden said about “Kipling and his views” is true of Abbey: “Time…pardons him for writing well.”

Because he writes beautifully, bringing all the tools of the greats: factual knowledge, superb memory, fine storytelling, lyricism, humor, polemic, expert use of detail, appropriation from the classics – to this work, and the full power of the desert as a place unfolds before you.

Maybe he gets a bit more tendentious toward the end, but this is such a long, rich book that’s a very minor quibble. I haven’t felt as completely engrossed in a book in a while. And the chapter about a ten-day drift on a raft through the incomparable, ageless Glen Canyon – just before it was drowned forever by the massive dam that created the bizarre and pointless Lake Powell - was so understatedly idyllic that the final effect was horrifying, literally heart-wrenching, exactly as I’m sure he intended it to be. show less

4/5
I first read Desert Solitaire when I was maybe fourteen, and it became a book that I would eventually trace my passion for the natural world, and more specifically the desert southwestern U.S., back to. I understand that Desert Solitaire is decisive to say the least amongst the environmental community, and for a lot of good reasons. I think that Abbey as a person has a few traits that make him a total asshole. His views in this book are laced with a quiet, and sometimes booming: sexism, show more racism, and self-obsession. His actions and words speak to both the time in which the book was written, and his own backwards attitudes that had no excuses even in his own time.

The heart and beauty in this book can be found when Abbey describes his environment. I think what draws me to his prose is that his brain views the natural world in a similar way to my own. His prose can be short and blunt, and yet he still finds a way to describe things with artistry, philosophy, and reverence. Particularly important I think is the lengthy chapter detailing his float down Glen Canyon. It seems that there are so few written descriptions of that place, in comparison with how important it was, and Abbey transported me there in such a passionate way. In addition, his humor, sarcasm, and loathing for the federal government, tourism, and the American way of life seem especially relevant today. Abbey tends to go on rants that read like George Carlin sets, and I could understand feeling anyway about them, even though I myself enjoy them greatly.

I think when reading Desert Solitaire, the reader has to detach their opinion of the author and his detestable ideas, from the real point and value of the book. If Abbey doesn't speak to you personally when it comes to the natural world, then it heartily deserves a low low score. But for whatever reason, I can't help but be transfixed by it. show less