Little Big Man (Panther)

When I was a kid, I read about cowboys and indians. Yeah, I know, I was born a few generations after the big wave of that stuff, but there was still Lucky Luke and Tintin In America and my dad's old 50s adventure books and plastic bows and arrows and toy guns.

Then, just as I was starting to discover newer stories where the white man was the evil colonist and the Native Americans were the innocent, nature-loving philosophers who cried every time someone dropped a gum wrapper, I saw Little Big Man. The movie version starring Dustin Hoffman, that is. And a lot of things changed there.

Little Big Man, both the movie and the novel it was based on (which I've now read for the first time) is about Jack Crabb. Jack is 111 at the beginning of the story in the mid-1950s, one of the oldest living Americans, and the last survivor (or so he claims) of the battle of Little Bighorn, where the combined forces of Sioux and Cheyenne soundly defeated the US cavalry for the first and last time. Except he's not just Jack Crabb, he's also Little Big Man; that's the name the Cheyenne gave him after they adopted him as a 10-year-old boy after killing most of the people in the wagon train he was travelling on. For the next 25 years, he spends his life drifting back and forth between his two lives; a Cheyenne brave watching his world disappear, or a white man trying to make a living in the new society that's growing out of the so-called Wild West - as gold digger, poker player, rich dandy, poor drinker, muleskinner, con man, anything. He has one family each by a Mexican woman, a white woman, and a Cheyenne woman. Does Jack Crabb run into every single famous person from Wyatt Earp to General Custer? You bet he does. Does Little Big Man witness racism, marginalisation and massacres of his people? Of course he does. It's almost too much. It's almost so you'd agree with the (fictional) post scriptum: either he's telling the complete truth, or he's lying about all of it.

So far I'd been a great admirer of civilization, but I figured that was because I hadn't come in touch with the process of its creation.

Little Big Man isn't a flawless literary masterpiece in terms of prose - it's not supposed to be, as it's allegedly just a typed interview with an old decrepit man, and probably could have used a ghostwriter (at least try and get him to stick to one tense in each sentense). As a pure adventure novel about the death of one civilisation and the rise of another it's excellent, thrilling, horrifying, hilarious and moving in equal parts, but there are a lot of those around too. Its greatest strength, what struck me so hard about the movie and works just as well here, is the fantastic detail in the description of life both on the prairie and in the frontier towns, and the fairness. (Allegedly, the native American actors in the movie refused to believe that the book was written by a white man.) Here, neither Cheyenne nor Americans are presented as exclusively good or bad - if anything, they're all a bit foolish, including Jack himself and possibly the reader, if we believe everything he tells us. They're all just human beings, prone to violence and irrationality, with a ton of history on their shoulders, hung up on honour and pride, blind to their own prejudices and all too willing to see the other side's. (This goes for our narrator too - even after all he's gone through, Jack Crabb remains a bit of a racist, a product of his time.) Berger, born three generations after all of this happened, brings both people and time to proud, foolish life. And, as a final reminder of the times, the novel ends by somewhat clumsily pointing at something that was just starting to happen in East Asia. Oh well, you can't have everything.

Now, all the above should be read with a caveat. See, I read this in translation, which normally isn't a problem, but the new Swedish translation is so atrociously bad you'd think the translator thought this was just one of my dad's 50s boy's adventures about whitehats and redskins - so bad that I find it difficult to say just how good this novel would be in English.