"Pity the Beast" by Robin McLean

An epic poem in prose, a sort of Iliad for the modern-day Wild West.

It is set in a ranching community. Dan has discovered that his wife, Ginny, has been having an affair. Furthermore, his mare is pregnant by a Percheron horse and suffers a difficult birth. Neighbours gather to help with the consequences and one thing leads to another and the gathering turns into a drunken party and, inflamed by an erotic story started by Ginny's sister, Ella, Ginny is gang-raped, flung into a lime pit and left for dead. But she isn't. She escapes into the mountains. And the party-goers must form a posse to track her down and either persuade her to keep silent or finish the job they started.

It’s a story about the animal inside each of us, but it is also about how this is in tension, in humans, with their need to be accepted. Wanting to be part of the group makes people do things that later they may wish they hadn’t, either though guilt or from the very practical consequences that might stem from the act.

The narrative is driven by the characters. Ella is a storyteller who discovers the devastating potential power of a narrative especially one fuelled by sibling rivalry. Saul. Ella’s husband, plays the preacher when a blessing is requested (although he thinks that “The Burning Bush was Abraham”). Like anyone so self-certain, so flawed, he can be encouraged by his wife to participate in gang-rape, he can be recruited to murder. The Rodeo Kid dreams of fame and fortune like any youngster; being young, he can’t imagine himself as a failure, as a lost cause, as dead. The Deputy, a greenhorn in the mountains, sees himself as the avenging hand of the Law, doing his duty even when he’s lost. Dan loves his wife and wants to forgive her even though she is the one who has been sinned against and is now seeking to escape; perhaps he really wants to forgive himself. Maul the muleman is gay. Bowman the tracker is a martinet who cannot show any sign of vulnerability. Ginny’s fatal flaw is that her passions overrule her reason, even to the extent of undermining her own instinct for self-preservation.

Each of these characters is tested by the challenging trek into the mountains. Their hopes and dreams crash into reality. But more than this, the author shows how each of these characters develops in response to the others. Our experiences mould and warp our souls. Life as survival can make life not worth living, just as the progress of our species might destroy the world.

But this is not a judgemental novel. The author describes her characters with tenderness and love. We get inside the head of each of them so that we understand them - as much as one can understand their ambiguous and muddled thought processes - and empathise ('Pity the Beast') with them. This reminded me of the inhabitants of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

There also interludes of science fiction. I didn't really understand why they were there, the're very short and widely-spaced and seemed to me to add little to the novel. Perhaps, together with the sometimes fractured narrative, they provided a faint atmosphere that reminded me of a William Burroughs novel such as The Place of Dead Roads or The Wild Boys.

Much of the writing uses short, sometimes staccato phrases, densely packed with meaning. It needs to be deciphered which can be hard work and slows the reader down. Often the paragraphs contain what seem to be unrelated items and these too need to be separated and related to themselves. For example: “The valley was a great black bowl with a few lights. The kid unsnapped his first pearly snap, then the second and third. The sky was clear but for a thunderhead. Heat lightning is a misnomer. There is always thunder. Its sound dissolves over distance obstructed by mountains or hills or the curve of the earth. ... The kid’s shirt was open to his belt. His skin steamed from the too-close flame. The party rubbed hands on knees, crossed and resettled their legs, and a boot kicked a leg and the fire sparked and flared and resettled.” (Percheron, p 51 - 52) We have description setting up a sympathetic fallacy. There is a sentence about ‘The kid’ and later in the paragraph another couple which are working to establish his macho naivety. There is more scene-setting description. There is talk about ‘the party’ which is a group of individuals who are attending an impromptu party, one which will end in tragedy. 

It felt hugely original, as if it was a sort of stream of consciousness in which the thoughts of the characters were mingled and mixed with the thoughts of the environment. It felt as if the stream-of-consciousness-tag of Virginia Woolf in which the interior monologue hops from head to head had merged with the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. It wasn't easy to read but - boy! - what a ride.

Selected quotes:

• “On the old ranch, running water was a girl sprinting with a bucket.” (Percheron, p33)
• “The Kid stands in the dusty ranch yard, his fists at the navy piping of dirty pants. He wears no shirt. He lost it in the confusion before our commercial break. His face is filthy, his chest and arms likewise. ... His eyes are blue as the sky, as sapphire shining in the sun, too rare a color to play an Indian. His day as the Indian is done. He is young. He is both thrilled and disappointed. He walks to the well, bows to it. There is soap in a tin cup. He sets his arm to work at pumping and he cleans himself of Indian. ... He’s been a child, a puppet. The strings are broke now. His privates still tingle. His eyes are full.” (Percheron, p 65)
• “The winds here can scream like a human man.” (Percheron, last sentence)
• “The mind contracts around paradox like a pearl.” (Bear, p 86)
• “Grannie never believed in trauma. She’d laughed at the word when it came into style. The world was made by trauma. Pray you have some or your life is dull.” (Bear, p 91)
• “We are each separate little dinghies, all floating alone but together, all caught in the same currents in the same ocean: a human lifetime.” (Dog, p 282)
• “The straying mariner is honor bound also. His duty is to offer an oar across the gap, to catch hold of the rope thrown to him, to pull back to the boats with all his might, to make the greatest effort to save himself. ... His life is borrowed property while he lives it, and so muct be preserved. The duty of each boat os equal and opposite and reciprocal.” (Dog, p 283)
• “The water jugs gonged on the mules’ ribs.” (Mule, p 320)

May 2025; 377 pages

First published in 2021 by And Other Stories

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God