He was born in Pennsylvania but came west in his ’20s, and became the prophet of the desert, a latter-day Diogenes. We parked the car and doubled back across Navajo Bridge to marvel at the sight.Ībbey loved this region. We were dropping down across a desert plateau, a ridge of russet cliff guarding the road to the left, and all at once, around a blind corner, we found ourselves on a bridge over a deep ravine - a place called Marble Canyon - and there was the Colorado River, a hundred feet or more below us. The landscape was vermillion red, and the shadows of the late afternoon were lengthening, and the colours all around were saturated - the orange-red of the soil contrasting dramatically with the impossibly rich blue of the sky. I remember vividly a few years ago, on a road trip through the desert Southwest with my daughter Flo and my son Ollie, heading east from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon towards Page, AZ. The novel is set in that part of the desert Southwest where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet - the ‘Four Corners’ region. It’s not a patch on ‘Desert Solitaire’, and it has its flaws, but it’s provoking and worth the ride. And I’m glad I did - because as well as being a fun caper novel, ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ is a richly prescient account of the ongoing struggle for the soul of the West, as pertinent today as when it was first written. So I bought a copy, and spent some happy hours last week making a metaphorical tour of the Canyonlands in the company of Hayduke, Seldom Seem Smith, Bonnie Abbzug and Doc Sarvis - Abbey’s quartet of merry eco-saboteurs. But I figured - any novel written by the author of ‘Desert Solitaire’ has got to be worth a try.
First published in 1975, the novel clearly retains significant cult appeal it has a jealous and protective fanbase none too pleased with the idea of Hollywood taming Abbey’s anarchic spirit.įrom what I gathered from the article, it was about a group of eco-activists fighting corporate despoliation on the Arizona / Utah border, which (frankly) sounded all very ‘70s.
To be honest I didn’t realize that Abbey wrote fiction - but then last week I read an article online about the various attempts to turn ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ into a movie. I’ve been re-reading ‘Desert Solitaire’ - see here - and the experience has inspired me to try one of Edward Abbey’s novels, an eco-activist caper called ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’.
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