Black Hills

A young Lakota boy's life is marked by his ability to see into the past and future of people he touches. This terrible power allows him, Paha Sapa, to foresee the death of Crazy Horse - an unforgivable crime that will cause him to flee his home in order to survive. Later, he will accidentally acquire the ghost of General Custer - an annoying companion who will haunt him for most of his life. From the battle field of the Little Bighorn Paha Sapa will go on to ride in Buffalo Bill's show, attend the Colombian Exposition in Chicago, and ultimately, help carve his beloved Black Hills into the form of the hated "fat stealer" presidents.

Paha Sapa's own name means Black Hills, and this final desecration of his nation's sacred place, as well show more as his terminal cancer, and caused him to form a plan. He intends to blow up these evil faces and himself in the process. When the president arrives to view the site, Paha Sapa will strike back against the white men and all that they have done to him.

Woo Boy, Dan Simmons you really ... just .... MUTILATED this book. I usually like Dan Simmons' work. He loves to create historical fiction with fantasy elements - and who wouldn't love to read that? He does obsessive research and creates extremely detailed portraits of eras. But this book just had no direction. I think it was because he tried to fit too much in. He wanted to cover Little Big Horn, and the Chicago World's Fair, and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and WWI, and the carving of Mount Rushmore. That's too many things, DAN!!

Once he decided to cover all these things, the plot of the book was entirely dictated by making sure the author got to tell us everything he wanted to tell us about all these different events. Even the character of Paha Sapa had to take a backseat to all the facts and figures that Danny Boy wanted to convey. I mean, Paha Sapa can read people's futures when he touches them. Also, the ghost of Custer lives inside him. Yet... this almost never comes up and is not important to the plot at all. It's really clear that Custer's ghost is only there to tell us facts about his life and career in long, sexually explicit monologues. So weird.

Likewise, it's clear that Paha Sapa's wife, Rain, only exists so that he has a reason to go to the World's Fair. After the author is done telling is all about the fair, Rain dies, and her presence barely impacts the plot. She is barely a character at all, so her death isn't even meaningful - and anyway, we it's coming moments after they meet, because Paha Sapa touches her. Likewise, Paha Sapa's son, Robert, exists only so that the author can tell us all about WWI. There is this... intensely bizarre scene where Robert decides to go to war and his dad is mad so they fight about it. The author's idea of a normal parent-child altercation literally involves them shouting casualty statistics at each other. ... Literally the only reason they are fighting is so that Dan can tell us about how many people died in the first day of fighting at the Somme. Way to suck any emotional punch out of a scene.

And SO MUCH of the book is like this. A single piece of off-hand dialogue where a person mentions an item of pop culture will result in the author painstakingly explaining (for instance) the history and importance of Amos and Andy, Bleak House, The Lone Ranger etc etc etc. This is not how you create vivid historical settings. This is also not how people talk or interact with each other.

The worst is when Custer would pop up with long explanations of how he, as a ghost living in a Lakota man's body, knows about current events because there was this one time twenty years ago where he happened to be looking out through the Lakota's eyes when he was reading a newspaper that had a front page story about BLAH BLAH BLAH. I don't care!! Nobody cares!! You are a ghost! I would be fine with you being somewhat omniscient! Stop telling me why you know things!!

And then the ending... OMG. The whole book has been leading up to the day when Paha Sapa is planning to blow up Mount Rushmore. But he doesn't even do that. He has a very realistic dream where he does and I got briefly excited for a minute. But then... nope. It was all a dream. I don't care that this didn't actually happen - we are already operating in a fantasy setting. Why not get weird with it and blow up the place? But no, instead Paha Sapa decides to go back to Little Big Horn and kill himself. He's literally standing in a field with a gun to his head when ... his long-lost daughter-in-law (whom he didn't know existed) shows up with his grand daughter who also happens to be pregnant with his great grand child.

Turns out, before Robert died of the flu, he got secretly married to ... you know, the daughter of the wealthiest and most established diamond-cutter in all of Belgium. That's what it was like during WWI, soldiers just had tons of time to go out, meet eligible young ladies, fall in love, and get married. It happened all the time. Especially rich young heiresses were being scooped up by common infantry soldiers. But leaving aside that FANTASTICAL situation - these wealthy Jewish diamond cutters are now fleeing Belgium because of Hitler and have decided to come to America. So now, Robert's wife is like, "Oh, I guess I'll look for my father-in-law." Even though he doesn't have a legal name, a permanent address, and literally no living human knows where he is. Despite all these impediments, she arrives at a random field just in time to make him not kill himself.

The good news is she's rich and makes him go to a doctor who is like, "JK, you don't have cancer." Paha Sapa lives to be old and famous and all his grand children and great grand children are geniuses who work to bring back prehistoric predators to the American plains in the far far future? Paha Sapa sees this in a vision? So... yay? The end. Just. Wow. show less

Having demonstrated that he can write successfully in any genre he chooses, Simmons plainly wanted a greater challenge, so he decided to create his own: the historical horror/supernatural genre. [b:The Terror|3974|The Terror|Dan Simmons|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165368437s/3974.jpg|3025639] and [b:Drood|3222979|Drood|Dan Simmons|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1253942563s/3222979.jpg|3257056] showed just how ambitious an idea this is and neither is perfect. For this, his third entry in his own genre, Simmons makes his own life easier by not using the first person voice of a Brit and thus avoiding all the problems of writing British English when you are an American English speaker - then makes it harder again by making the show more narrator a Lakota Indian and having to deal with a language that is not remotely like English...

So Paha Sapa (Black Hills) tells his life story and a remarkable life it is, what with being at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (or Greasy Grass in Lakota), inhabited by the ghost of Custer and the memories of Crazy Horse (who is pretty crazy), a participant in Buffalo Bill Hicock's Wild West Show, a powder-man at the Mt. Rushmore sculpting and a man prone to visions when at spiritually important locations.

Through the voices of various people, the visions and direct experiences of Paha Sapa, Simmons is able to tell the tale of the final destruction of the plains Indians' way of life, starting with the Pyrhhic victory of the Greasy Bighorn (or Little Grass, or something) and the subsequent environmental degradation caused mainly by cattle ranching but this is no simple monument to a dead culture. Simons points out that the Lakota were violent, stealing women and horses from neighbouring tribes, having gained their territory by ousting the people who were there when they arrived...which might remind one of what the European settlers did. Other tribes were much the same. They were not, despite their religion, "in harmony with nature" either, having apparently hunted to extinction various paleo-megafauna (which is a just fabulous word) of the North American plains. The Lakota called themselves Human Beings and every other racial grouping were not proper people...most other tribes' languages made the same distinction for their tribe...

Where is Simmons going with all this? Only so far as to say, oh look - the Plains Indians were human too, and prone to the same foibles, crimes and passions as everyone else. They were certainly sinned against but they were sinners too. Which raises the question, what's the difference between a bunch of tribes with essentially the same technology, philosophy and religion warring with each other for territory and a completely alien culture coming along and doing the same thing but to all the tribes at once? It feels like there is one. The book forces you to think over questions of cultural relativism, colonialism and evangelism. Here is a classic "Outside Context Problem" as discussed in Iain Banks' [b:Excession|12013|Excession|Iain M. Banks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1288930712s/12013.jpg|1494164]. However, Simmons hasn't discussed the same topic over and again ad nauseum so it isn't annoying...

It's an impressive feat, as were drood and the Terror but they were both flawed; is Black Hills? Unfortunately, yes it is. The problems are all in the "Paha goes to New York City" chapter where Simmons goes completely crackers and starts writing like Dan Brown! By which I mean that he insists on pouring every tedious statistic about the dimensions, weight, shoe and hat-size of the Brooklyn Bridge. I had serious flash-backs to the Louvre scene at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code. Also the shakes, sweats and a fever. The horror!

Listen guys! Readers do not care what the length, breadth, height and weight of any famous building or engineering work is, expressed to three significant figures and dumped on them all at once like, well like a 597 metre long, 1.27 metric tonne, 3.14cm diameter coil of steel cable. (See? And I just made those figures up 'cos they just don't matter.) All of this ruins an impressive, evocative story about how the caissons for the bridge were made fast on bedrock below the mud of the Hudson. So, authors, having done the work to discover a fact is not sufficient reason for putting said fact in the book. If it doesn't advance the story, help set the scene or aid the subtext, leave it out.

Paha Sapa has three visions in the book. One is very bleak indeed and comes true. Another has his ancestors exhorting Paha Sapa to take action to save his people. He has a completely false notion of what this action should be. Can he save his people? The third vision is a prophecy: the plains will be restored to something like their former glory and neo-Indians will live there, within a newly rebuilt eco-system, resuscitated after clinical death by climate change and mono-culture farming.

I don't share Simmons' optimism but it's worth reading about it. show less

Like Frederik Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, this is a thriller whose plot is bounded by the historical record. In the Forsyth novel, we know the Jackal's plot is not going to succeed. Charles de Gaulle is not going to be assassinated. And here we know that our hero, Paha Sapa ("Black Hills" in Lakota) is not going to destroy Mount Rushmore.

This is not an alternate history. It is not a secret history in the style of Tim Powers with secret groups and motives of historical characters not those on record.

It is the sort of historical novel in which our hero careens through some iconic and important historic events or hears about them secondhand: the Battles of the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and the show more building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the first sentence, the ghost of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer enters Paha Sapa's mind. That historical figure, who gets several chapters of his own which range from erotic remembrances of his wife Libbie to a poignant observation that her life was wasted in dedication to his memory, infests Paha Sapa's head for decades. Paha Sapa has a peculiar psychic talent that allows him, upon touching someone, to know their personal history and future.

This runs him afoul of another historical figure, Crazy Horse, portrayed here unsympathetically, indeed likened to the Nazis in one passage. The ten year old Paha Sapa flees to his name sake to receive a sacred vision. There, on the Six Grandfathers, what we know as Mount Rushmore, he receives a vision that compels him, eventually, to plot the destruction of Gutzon Borglum's work.

The character of Borglum is one of the highlights here. Brilliant, manipulative and with secrets of his own, he works with Paha Sapa on the Rusmore project.

The story careens back and forth in time in Paha Sapa's life, the tension escalating in the final third. At novel's end, the story that begins with blood shed ends in sort of a reconciliation between white and Indian.

Simmons' novel does not subscribe to any of the false pieties regarding American Indians: peaceful, egalitarian, and wise stewards of the environment. Indeed, some of those notions are challenged.

It is a surprisingly suspenseful novel and will probably not only appeal to historical fiction fans (which I am not) as well as fans of historical fantasy. show less

As usual his need to show off his research is in abundance, but here it stifles the story rather than revealing motivation, and chunks of exposition appear just when things were getting interesting. Still, he's a magical writer when he lets his imagination soar, and parts of this, in particular the sections dealing with the protagonist's spiritual quests really soar.

It's not in the same upper bracket as The Terror or Carrion Comfort, not as gripping as Drood, and hasn't got the thrills of The Abominable, but it held my attention, although I could have done without knowing quite so much about General Custer's sex life.

Dan Simmons continues his string of books that "fill in the blank spaces" of history - not to be mistaken with alternate-history pieces like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer which just play fast and loose with history. Black Hills gives us a picture of life for the native Americans - particularly the Lakota Sioux - from Custer's Last Stand at the Little Big Horn (Greasy Grass, to the Sioux) through the sculpting of Mount Rushmore.

Keep in mind that Black Hills is on a par with Simmons' other recent books, The Terror and Drood, both of which add a supernatural element to documented events, using those elements to instill some sense of meaning to the events, rather than distort the actual history.

The Black Hills (Paha Sapa, in Lakota) in show more question is a Lakota who was given that name after three men in his tribe had dreams of a child and the real Black Hills. Paha Sapa has the "gift" of being able to see a person's past and future upon touching them, a gift which has mixed blessings - as a young boy he follows the warriors going to fight Custer, and, after the main battle, when he goes to "count coup" on one of the soldiers, ends up with Custer's ghost living in his mind.

One of my favorite movies is Dances With Wolves, although I have always felt it was an over-romanticization of Native Americans. What is interesting about Simmons' account (especially in the last 100 pages) is that it takes a hard look at the Sioux, in particular, and Native Americans in general, and it is not a romanticized, politically correct, or whitewashed account. Simmons is fastidious in his research, so I give him great credence; life for those people was brutal, and they were brutal. At the very least, it is refreshing to read something that doesn't take an apologistic tone - but rather, a measured, clear, and analytical tone.

This book cements Simmons as one of my favorite contemporary authors; it is well worth reading. show less

Not my favorite Simmons book by a long shot. The writing is excellent. The story is engaging but overall I found it boring. The parts with Custer really made me want to close the book. Simmons made him sound like a man out of time....which in a way he was since Paha carried him around for sixty years, but when he spoke I felt like I was listening to someone who was born in the late 20th century. Paha was a great character. Like many of Simmons's characters he was flawed and human.

When I had the chance to read and review this book, I was excited. I’d just finished Drood by this author and loved it. I wasn’t sure what the Black Hills was about but the author’s storytelling style is so great that I just knew I would find the topic interesting. Nevertheless, before I said yes to the review, I did some research to find out more. It turned this novel couldn’t have been more different from Drood! To be capable of writing on two such diverse topics and in such an in-depth style just solidifies my certainty that Dan Simmons is one great writer.

Black Hills is not only a place in the Dakotas but also a person, Paha Sapa, a young Lakota boy growing into manhood who witnesses the changes to his home as North America show more moves inexorably into the twentieth century. Progress, which often doesn’t translate into a good thing, can’t be stopped. Black Hills, the place and the person, shows how a people cope and sometimes how they don’t.

It took me about fifty pages before I started really getting into the story but after that the plot became very interesting. There is one scene where the characters are caught in a huge dust storm and the manner in which the author described it made me feel like I needed to spit grit out of my own mouth. The narrative is well-written (which is something I was taking for granted even before I started reading given how Drood was written) and the imagery breath-taking. The story goes back and forth in time following the main character’s experiences with his tribe, General George Armstrong Custer and other military and native warriors, as well as at Chicago’s World Fair in the late 1800’s, and other settings. I’m amazed at the amount of research the author must have done to get just the right sense of authenticity to make the story work. The rituals of Native Americans of the Sioux tribe are described with striking beauty and sensitivity.

I don’t think I would have picked up this book on my own, but now I’m so glad I did read it. I learned much and enjoyed a great story at the same time. In the end it’s just what I expected to experience with this author. I’m a confirmed ‘Simmonite’! I highly recommend Black Hills to anyone who enjoys American history or, for that matter, just a really good story. show less