Arroooo...

The Loop by Nicholas Evans
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book walks the line in an unusual way: the stretches of formulaic drama almost ruined my interest, but the tense action scenes and hints of moral introspection were just enough to keep me turning the pages.

The story unfolds in the town of Hope, Montana. In the nearby wilderness, a pack of reintroduced wolves - part of a government effort to restore wolf populations after they had been hunted to near extinction - are on the hunt. The trouble is, Hope is a community of cattle ranchers, and any threat to their livestock and livelihood is taken dead seriously. Into this fiercely self-sufficient little town comes Helen Ross: a wildlife biologist on a mission to track and protect the wolves, and to keep the locals' growing anger at bay.

A few facts about Helen:

1) She is enchantingly attractive and exerts a magnetic pull on every man she meets.
2) She is wholly unaware of point #1.
3) Her sense of self-worth hinges on her romantic relationships.

Sigh.

Among the locals that Helen meets (and inevitably charms) are the powerful, charismatic, ruthless rancher Buck Calder, and his sensitive son Luke, who suffers from a speech impediment. To the chagrin of his father, Luke cares deeply about nature, including wolves. He sees in wild animals a reflection of himself: creatures struggling to cope with the way that humans run the world, and unable to speak up for themselves. Luke is probably the character that I found most interesting.

Most of the characters, are introduced with several pages of backstory that tend to consist of difficult disappointments and/or sticky romantic entanglements. I found myself having to take in large tracts of information about characters that I didn't particular care about yet - I would rather have had my interest sparked, and then discover more about these people bit by bit. And perhaps some blanks are just better left unfilled. A bigger problem is that the use of so many big, external disasters in their histories - death, disease, betrayal - made it seem that these were the only things the characters were shaped by. Certainly, those big events can sculpt people's lives, but so can less obvious things, and I was left feeling that most people in the book were a little underdeveloped - despite all the time spent showing the hardships they'd been through.

The overarching feeling was of channel-surfing through soap operas, occasionally interspersed with nature documentaries.

However, I can say that when the author wanted to create tension and excitement, he did it very well. There were a bunch of scenes during which the pages flew by. There were also parts of the book (dealing with hunting and trapping) that I personally found too distressing to read carefully, which I ended up having to skim through. Not really a negative or a positive, just a matter of my own sensitivity.

The book did stimulate my interest in the history of human interactions with wolves. While reading the descriptions of the early boom in wolf hunting, the word that came to mind was, simply, genocide. The fact that some people (over the course of generations, or sometimes over the course of a single life) have come to realize that killing off an entire species is a bad idea - and that it's worthwhile trying to do something to remedy it - made me feel a little bit more optimistic about how humans might interact with other species in the future.

Indian folklore had it that the spirits of all America's slaughtered wolves lived on... Awaiting a time when they might safely walk again upon the earth.

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