Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Long Crawl of Hugh Glass

There is no chin behind Hugh Glass's beard. There is only another fist.

For today's Roger Zelazny review, I'll be looking at The Long Crawl of Hugh Glass.

I suppose I've been thinking about Hugh Glass for a while now, what with the coverage of Rep. Gabby Giffords, her shooting and her ongoing recovery, which is frankly, nothing less than astonishing. People die from the stupidest things all the time, and sometimes happenstance allows us to survive catastrophic trauma that should by all rights, kill us outright.

First things first. The Long Crawl of Hugh Glass is such a great title for a story.  I first read it in the Varley/Mainhardt Superheroes collection in about 2000, give or take. These were the days before the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny undertook their mammoth endeavor, back when a fan had to look in the pages of random magazines or largely unpublicized anthologies to find works that hadn't been collected elsewhere. I was already partial to superheroes (as I've talked about elsewhere on this blog)  and I probably would have picked up the collection even if it didn't have Zelazny's name on the cover, though once I saw it, it certainly sealed the deal.

Personally, I think it's quite a stretch to include this story in a superhero anthology, as it's only a superhero story in the extremely broadest sense.

 Hugh Glass is a hunter mauled by a bear. Zelazny sets up the opening scene beautifully.

Hugh Glass had one chance to kill the bear, and whether his shot struck it or went completely astray, he never knew.It charged him, brushing aside the rifle before he could club with it as its paw fell upon his face, smashing his nose, tearing through the skin of his brow. Then its great forelimbs came upon him, its breath awful, fetid of ripe flesh and the musky smell of skunk, overlaid with a sweetness of berries and honey that made him think of a waiting, perfumed corpse too long aboveground while distant mourners hurried for the viewing.

His spirit seemed to turn slowly within his head and breast, a white and gray eddy of dissolving perceptions, as his blood ran into his eyes and traced trails down his frosted beard. A large man, bearlike himself in the eyes of his fellows, he did not cry out, did not know fear; a great gasp had rung much of the air from him, leaving him voiceless and the attack had come so quickly that there had been no time to be afraid. Now what he felt seemed familiar; for he was a hunter, providing game for eighty men, dealing daily death as a way of business of life. And it was suddenly his turn. It would have been good to say farewell to Jamie, but there are always things undone. The cracking of his ribs was not such a terrible thing through the falling white and gray; the sound from his thigh might have been a snapping branch in some distant forest. He was no longer there to feel the ground as he crashed against it.

The first page is just one of those times an author gets everything perfect. The choice of words, the repetition, the descriptions of the smells and the distant sensations. Flawless.

The meter of the opening line strongly parallels the introduction of John D'Arcy Donnerjack, which is also a bit of writing I happen to particularly enjoy.

• Hugh Glass had one chance to kill the bear, and whether his shot struck it or went completely astray, he never knew.
• John D'Arcy Donnerjack loved but once and when he saw the moiré he knew it was over.

Immediately after the attack, Hugh's companion Jamie comes upon the scene, recognizes "the shaggy totem shape" of the bear and kills it. He then goes to mourn Hugh, only to find that the big man is still alive. He decides to sit with his friend so that he might have companionship through his final hours. But Hugh hasn't died by the next morning.

I like how Zelazny is true to both his distinctive style and the style of the frontier. I don't know if phrases like  "Looks a sight, too" or "Amazing strong" are factually representative of the manner of speaking in that time and place, but they certainly feel like they are.

As a rule, I generally don't like fictionalized accounts of actual events. I touched on this briefly in an earlier review, where I said of Forever After "The cover pages reads 'created by' Roger Zelazny, which reminded me of something my high school sociology teacher said, 'If the label on your spaghetti sauce reads 'flavored with meat', it just means they walked a cow past it.'

After reading this (possibly apocryphal) account of an encounter between the author Honoré de Balzac and Eugène François Vidocq (founder of the French Sûreté) I warmed to the process of tweaking the specifics of a story, but keeping the essence.

Balzac was munching a Montreuil peach, when Vidocq said to him, "Monsieur de Balzac, you go to a lot of trouble to create stories of the other world, when reality is here under your eyes, near your ears, under your hand." Balzac laughed. "So you believe in reality! You delight me. I would not have believed you could be so naive. Reality! Talk to me about it. You have just come back from that beautiful country. We make reality." Vidocq protested: "No, Monsieur de Balzac." Balzac persisted: "Yes, Monsieur Vidocq." He held up his peach. "You see, the true reality is this beautiful peach from Montreuil. The one you would call real, you, that one grows naturally, in the forest, on the wild peach tree. Well! that one is nothing; it is small, bitter, sour, impossible to eat. But here is the real peach, the one I hold, which has been cultivated for a hundred years, which has been obtained through cuttings here and there, through transplantation in dry or light ground, some kind of grafting; the one one eats, which perfumes one's mouth and heart. That exquisite peach, we made it, it is the only real one. Same thing with me. I get reality in my novels, as Montreuil gets reality in peaches. I am a gardener of books."

TVtropes calls it Adaptation Distillation and I think that's as good a name for the technique as any.

...The bear approached Hugh again and he couldn't run from it. It was as if his feet had grown roots. The bear walked upright , its face flowing like dark water. He saw his father there, and the faces of men he had had to kill. Dark birds flew out of the bear, flapping their wings in his face.

Did Hugh Glass really have this nightmare following his bear attack? I doubt it, but it conveys the delirium and desperation he must have felt as he hung suspended between life and death.

Hugh was "Amazing strong" but that strength was working against him. After several days, his companions dig him a grave, take his gun and his gear and split, because they have noticed signs of Ree (Arikara) in the area.

Hugh, like other Zelazny protagonists is moved by "a hate so big it would burn the innocent to reach the guilty", and like Corwin, by an indomitable will to survive. The story is nothing less than astonishing. He was so weak he could only crawl at first, he rolled on to a log and let maggots eat out the infected flesh; he did everything he needed to to survive.

I found the flashbacks to his time as a pirate less interesting, but only because the account of his saga in the wilderness was so good.

I like it a lot. As is typical with me, I prefer the shorter work in the form of The Long Crawl of Hugh Glass to the version interspersed with accounts of John Colter in Wilderness.

I'm not as huge a science fiction fan as I used to be. As a kid, I would devour whatever trash you put in front of me as long as it had aliens and ray guns. Now, I'm just as omnivorous, but in a different fashion. I'll read anything as long as it's good. The Collected Stories touches on this a little bit, but for a variety of reasons, Zelazny never published a large amount of non-genre material, which is a bit of a shame, because the little bit he did is every bit as good as his well-known works.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Glass, Christian Bale may portray him in an upcoming movie, though it seems that this is in the very preliminary stages, as the IMDB doesn't even have an entry for it as of this writing.

Also, I don't play World of Warcraft, but apparently Hugh is there as an NPC with a pet Grizzly Bear. How awesome is that?!