The Whistling Season
By Ivan Doig
The first book I ever read by Ivan Doig was The Whistling Season. This Big Sky author has left behind a
lifetime’s work of compassionately written stories about the West and
especially Montana for readers to continue to treasure. A life well lived, and now the sorrow of his
passing hits so many.
He’s an icon in the literature of the American West. But, on his website Ivan Doig repudiated the
regional inference: "I don't think of myself as a 'Western' writer. To me,
language — the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose — is the
ultimate 'region,' the true home, for a writer." That poetry under prose is one of the unique aspects
that frame his stories. Rhythm, word
choice, lyrical intent are the elements of his writing which comes across with
a fresh, natural openness.
The Whistling Season
is a charming tale of love and loss, truth and lies, and education—conventional
and otherwise. It is, like most of his
books, set in rural Montana. The
narrator, Paul Milliron, is looking back almost 50 years, from the vista of
1957, back to when he was a boy.
From an interview with Ivan Doig on this novel he said, “My
secret is out, sort of, kind of. Maybe more than any other character or, at
least any other narrator who I have ever created, Paul has a few of my mental
fingerprints. He loves language, even Latin—which I took in high school. He’s
an inveterate reader of books. He eavesdrops with his eyes. He admits to a bit
of a pedantic streak. He’s his own person, though.”
The Whistling Season presents Paul Milliron’s passion for isolated public schools that infuse
vitality into their communities. He
narrates a loving portrait of this one-room schoolhouse. In 1957 he’s a man at the end of a
career as overseer of Montana schools. In
the era of Sputnik and modernization, he has been charged with announcing the
mandated closing of the state's remaining one-room schoolhouses.
The novel’s main plot is straightforward and honest. In 1909 Oliver Milliron, a recently widowed
father of three boys, answers a newspaper ad from a widow in Minneapolis seeking
employment: "Can't Cook But Doesn't Bite." Oliver,
a plain man with a love of language can't resist. When Rose Llewellyn's train arrives, he
discovers more than he bargained for; she’s brought her brother Morris.
Rose is feisty, willful and charming. She takes over housekeeping duties, whistling
all the while. Morris, due to the sudden
elopement of the one teacher, is appointed to the post. Home life, and lessons in the classic one-room
schoolhouse, continue but now changed by these spirited eccentrics.
Thereby hangs a tale . . . .
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