"Painted Horses"--by Malcolm Brooks--Rich with history, and offering an involving story line and compelling characters, "Painted Horses" is a memorable debut from author Malcolm Brooks. (see my review)

 

Painted Horses

In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape, in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress.

Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her—a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar—the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.

MY REVIEW:  The American West of the Post-WWII Era is the perfect time frame and setting for this striking tale of the eternal struggle between the greed of man, the force of nature, and the timelessness of elemental truth. In the wild beauty of Montana, Catherine Lemay will discover, in a life-changing manner, that much of what she thought she knew of herself and the world around her was masked by pleasant illusions. Hired as an archaeologist by a power company to prove that their expansive dam project will not destroy irreplaceable historic treasures, Catherine will learn that she is expected to find nothing of significance--nothing that will impede "progress". However, what she discovers about the land, the wild horses that refuse to be vanquished, and the workings of her own heart will not be denied. John H, the man who will lead Catherine to see with new eyes and will touch her very soul, is much like the hunted horses himself. A veteran and horseman living outside of society in the refuge of the great canyon, his paintings of horses on cave walls tell an ancient, ongoing story. Rich with history, and offering an involving story line and compelling characters, "Painted Horses" is a memorable debut from author Malcolm Brooks.

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Reviews

“Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world emerges for readers to fall into. Painted Horses creates several worlds.” —USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)

“Extraordinary . . . both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient . . . Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.”—Boston Globe

“Malcolm Brooks’ novel has the hard thrill of the West, when it was still a new world, the tenderness of first love and the pain of knowledge. This book is a gripping, compulsively readable page-turner.”—Amy Bloom, author of Away

“Painted Horses reads like a cross between Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, with a pinch of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient for good measure. . . . An earnest, romantic novel.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Lush, breathtaking prose that expertly captures the raw essence of an American West known for its wide-open spaces and unbridled spirit. . . . Masterful.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy, and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned and important novel.”—Rick Bass, author of All the Land to Hold Us

“Evocative . . . Brooks’ prose rings true.”—The Seattle Times

“Painted Horses is evidence that the many-peopled, colorific, panoramic, fully-wraparound, pull-you-in-by-the-heels, big-questions, literarily deft ‘Great American Novel’ still lives.”—Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

“Grandly romantic . . . Blood. Sex. War. Equine Expertise. Past versus Progress. Money versus Love and Sacred Places. One can almost hear Hollywood’s horsemen rumbling toward this tale.” —Orion

“Painted Horses is a wonderful novel full of horses, archeology, the new West, and two fascinating women. Malcolm Brooks should be lauded for this amazing debut. Very fine.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog

“Painted Horses vividly evokes an earlier time, a place and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change. In his gift for the language of horses and the culture of horsemen, Brooks will inevitably recall Cormac McCarthy. And like Ivan Doig in Bucking the Sun, he mines one of the darker veins in the mythology of the American West”—The Washington Post

“A love song to the Western frontier, Painted Horses is a new, truly American, work of art.”—San Antonio Current

“Malcolm Brooks has the same intuitive understanding of women that his character John H has of horses. Painted Horses is a beautiful, sensual, authentic novel. A western novel that is about so much more than the West, it is an exquisite, enthralling debut.”—Lily King, author of Euphoria

“The next great western novel . . . Vivid—and often romantic . . . The past echoes through the canyons of the West in this richly layered first novel.”—The Daily Beast

“Ambitious and affecting . . . A sweeping and dramatic saga.”—Big Sky Journal

 

Malcolm Brooks

"I was born near Philadelphia in 1970 but my parents headed west before a full year had passed, caught up in the classic American tradition of hitting the trail after a different destiny. I latched on to the trappings of that myth right off the bat--according to my mother, I stretched out the springs on two hobby-horses before I was three, galloping along in front of the stereo speakers to "Rocky Raccoon," or "Riders on the Storm," or whatever soundtrack she thought might fit.

I grew up mainly in Northern California in a fairly rural part of the Sierra foothills, a place fairly littered with the old artifacts of long-lost Indian tribes and the 1849 Gold Rush. My brothers and I used to find Czech trade beads on a property we rode horses on, and old prospecting implements and the remnants of mining camps everywhere. Forgotten stone chimneys, rusting pickaxes half-buried in the ground. Most kids' interest ran from indifferent to momentarily piqued, but I saw the stuff in my dreams, would spend hours in a 19th century graveyard just to wonder who these people were.

I read a lot from an early age and by junior high had diverse interests, from paperback Westerns to English mysteries to blockbuster historical novels. Then my eighth grade English teacher, Marcia Callenberger, gave me a novel that changed my life, because it made me want to be a writer. "Lonesome Dove" was unlike anything I'd ever read, a hilarious, character-driven epic that followed no formula but struck me in the heart like nothing before.

I knocked around the West in my early twenties, learning carpentry along the way to support myself and attempting college in fits and starts. I still read like crazy, discovering Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje, knowing I wanted to be a writer but not quite knowing what sort of writer I wanted to be, like a guitarist with a schizoid devotion to both Segovia and Angus Young. Thomas McGuane struck a chord with me because he was clearly connected to so many things I myself had a love for--horses and fly-fishing, bird shooting and the West and above all stylish writing.

I finally landed in Missoula, Montana in my mid-twenties, tackling an English degree in earnest and finding my way to literary parties and events through my then-girlfriend, a poet and MFA candidate. I hunted a lot and rode horses when I could, wrote a couple of novels I hated and began to publish essays and short stories in magazines, then landed a job as a writer and consultant for an outdoor television company. Eventually I wound up in front of the camera myself, hosting a hunting-oriented target competition called "The Shooters" and all the while concocting this novel in my head, this huge, sprawling book that would somehow connect the dots of everything I'd ever been consumed by, archaeology and the West, Basques and Indians and the Lascaux cave, hunting and horses and the inevitable pros and cons of progress.

Six years later, I named it "Painted Horses.""

https://malcolm-brooks.com/titles.html