Chris Hannan has tried to strip away the expectations of the cowboy genre
CHRIS Hannan is standing at the window of his Granton flat looking out to the Firth of Forth. He is recalling the evening he received the e-mail from Courtney Hodell, then an editor at HarperCollins in New York, saying she loved his debut novel, Missy. Getting back to him only five days after he'd sent the manuscript, she said she'd fallen in love with the book and adored the voice of Dol McQueen, the novel's wayward heroine.
"I walked out to that long jetty out there," says Hannan. "It was wonderful that she liked the voice, but that night was the first time it had occurred to me: 'What if she hadn't liked the voice?' It would have been over. There can't be any question about the voice. It's got to be perfect. I can't tell you how I felt. It was brilliant, obviously, but there was suddenly the realisation of what a fool I had been to take on that task. It was a cretinous thing to do."
If ever a first-time novelist ignored the old advice to "write about what you know", Hannan is it. He is a 50-year-old Glasgow-born and Oxford-educated playwright, best known for The Evil Doers, Shining Souls and Elizabeth Gordon Quinn. His heroine, by contrast, is a 19-year-old prostitute balancing her taste for opium with her concern for her out-of-control mother in the lawless Wild West of the 1860s.
That Missy is an action-packed page-turner is achievement enough. That it also has the tang of frontier authenticity is little short of remarkable. "I was trying to get back to the original experience which has been encrusted with all this mythology," says Hannan, who studied scores of diaries from the time and even sailed the Atlantic by cargo ship in his quest for historical integrity. "I wanted to create a story about the West where there's that sense of awe and the feeling that it was amazing and really unusual."
His successful assimilation of character, place and accent means Hannan has the double acclaim of being published by Chatto and Windus in the UK and, in a couple of months, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the prestigious New York publishing house responsible for 21 Nobel Prizes in literature, where Hodell is now executive editor. And Missy is the first of a two-book deal.
What has so excited his publishers is not only the novel's riveting vision of a feisty young woman who is not as smart as she thinks, but also its evocation of the harsh realities of the Wild West. A world away from the romance of the cowboy film, Missy creates a visceral sense of the challenges of travelling through the desert, negotiating with native Americans, surviving bar-room brawls, scratching a living in shanty towns, fending off pimps and maintaining a steady intake of drink and opiates.
"I had this image of people like us going there," he says. "We can't shoot, we can't hunt, we can't kill rabbits, we know nothing about the Indians. When I did my research it turned out that that was the case. It was people like us."
In this, Missy is very much a western of today, having more in common with the Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood and its unsentimental vision of the pioneering days of the oil industry than with the bang-bang-you're-dead tradition of cowboys films. "There was the western genre, then the anti-westerns, like Unforgiven, where you show that gun-fighting is not as easy, but there's a thing emerging which is to look at the West in a new way and to lose the genre trappings," he says, thinking of novelists such as Cormac McCarthy and E Annie Proulx.
"They're writing modern westerns, dropping the gun fights, but using the landscape and the mythology. There Will Be Blood is a typical western story: the big company taking over the community of smallholders. You get it in Shane, Pale Rider and Heaven's Gate. But in There Will Be Blood, for the first time you get it from the point of view of the big guy.
"The West is such a fantastic place to set stories, to create mythologies, and people are now going at it again with fresh eyes. There's a bad tradition of westerns being elegiac – the last cowboy, the last Indian – but the fun of the West is the energy. People went there to seize opportunities and become different people. That's part of the real West."
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Missy is published by Chatto and Windus, £12.99The full article contains 804 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
