This is an intense Irish love story. An absolute, classic gem of a love story. Our lovers, Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie, are hapless, feckless and doomed right from the start, but their love never falters. I say it’s Irish because the writer is Irish, the lovers are Irish and they begin their story in an Irish community with lots of drinking. Their all-encompassing love is very Irish. However, Tom and Polly are in Butte, a desolate mining town in the mountains of Montana; 1891, a cold winter. So the story is really a western! So far, so terrific.
We meet Tom not going out, well, just for the one and then a chaser and he’s off, drinking and fighting around the bars of Butte, strung out on opiates and booze, earning coins writing letters for the lonesome, avoiding the girls of the line cribs and all those he owes money until four in the morning, when he is booted through the air from some gin joint, and lands at the feet of a horse. A palomino. Tom introduces himself to her. The horse stilled herself utterly and fixed the lashes of the long stare on him. Tom is absolutely enchanted. We learn that when Tom falls, he falls hard.
Polly is a mail order bride, running away from some trouble or other. We get sideways comments of Polly’s past through the story, (that’s not to be taking out the violin for you), enough to know she’s out of luck. We meet her posing unhappily for a wedding photograph with her captain. Tom’s there. Her skin was pale and flawless but for a single electrifying mole on the shoulder’s blade. The tip of her nose twitched and her eyes searched for the camera but found instead Tom Rourke’s, staring –
It was at that moment that his heart turned.
She has a power over him. She lets him in at night when the captain’s working, they sneak out and run around the town. He’s a man of words and they joke together, make songs. They learned quickly enough they could talk to each other without speaking. Like he’d start off a notion in his head and she’d finish it off for him or vice versa and they were never off with the sense of it not even once. She knew she was in a lot of trouble already and she wasn’t three weeks in Butte.
Tom and Polly steal the palomino and strike out of town. There is no going back. The captain sets bounty hunters after them and they are tracked like animals through the freezing mountains. This is the story of the chase. Many paragraphs begin: They rode on, they rode double, they rode south, they rode out, they rode on, and every day is greeted with astonishment that they are still alive and still free.
I’ll be honest here, there is a style to the writing that takes a bit of getting used to. No speech indicators, few commas, generally erratic punctuation, long rambling sentences and tight, choppy ones. Guttural vernacular. The story is one of harsh treatment and brutal cold and near starvation page after page after page with this sort of knowing, tormented inevitability that this will end badly. It’s painful. But then: They kissed and ran their limbs together. He took off her red wool socks and warmed her toes on his chest. That’s what keeps them going and us reading. It’s the love.
I needed a couple of light, fluffy reads to get over the despair of The Heart in Winter. Saying that, I do thoroughly recommend it. Offer it up to your book club mid-winter. It’s masterful writing, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
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