Bucking the Sun is the story of the Duff family, homesteaders driven from the Montana bottomland to work on one of the New Deal's most audacious projects -- the damming of the Missouri River. Through the story of each family member -- a wrathful father, a mettlesome mother, and three very different sons and the memorable women they marry, Doig conveys a sense of time and place that is at once epic in scope and rich in detail.
As in This House of Sky and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana, Doig returns to Big Sky country to tell a complex murder mystery peppered with the free-spirit history of the west and the intrigue of Doig's Scottish ancestry. Through Franklin Roosevelt's W.P.A. and P.W.A., the Duff family becomes involved in the construction of the Fort Peck Dam, the largest earth-fill dam in the world. While most are happy for the work, there are others in the Duff clan that hope for the dam's failure. Mixing fact and fiction, Doig explores the hardships of labor, of Fort Peck's shantytown housing, and the Duffs' resilience to everything from Montana blizzards to rattlesnakes. When two in the clan are murdered, Scottish family loyalty is questioned and the remaining family members face their toughest challenge.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Building a dam:
The characters in this novel are well described and true to the character of Montanans. Doig makes my heart ache for the people of a state I learned to love.
Bucking The Sun, A GoodRead:
I read this because my parents were at Ft Peck in 1933 where my dad worked as an engineer. My parents were "very proper" city people. My mother talked about living in a 24' X 24' construction shack, bathing in a wash tub in water heated from the stove, and hanging clothes to dry where they froze and the ice evaporated in the dry Montana air.
This story brought their experiences to light in a unique way. The Ft Peck area in 1933 Montana was Wild West beyond my imagination. The author brings it to life,... more info
Will It Ever End ?:
Ivan Doig, as usual, writes great sentences and very good paragraphs. However, once he gets beyond 200 pages, the whole story drags. I liked his shorter books very much, and waited until I had several weeks of free time to tackle this longer work, knowing it would be slow going. It turned out to be even slower reading than I expected. Doig obviously learned a lot from Stegner about constructing long, complex sentences out of unfamiliar words ( or non-words on all too many occasions ) that have to be parsed... more info
Sum of its Parts:
A fine novel worth your time, but definitely not a mystery book. Sure the first 10 pages describe a murder scene, but there's nothing to solve. Actually, it doesn't get solved, it's lived with, and really that can be said for much of what the Duff family experiences.
All members of the family Duff are unique, as are their relationships. All are enjoyable with only the Scottish Uncle seeming a little too polished; his dialogue a little too precise. But that's a quibble because overall, Doig does very well... more info
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