Ivan Doig's 'Work Song' is epic novel of miners, strikes and hardship

'Work Song'

by Ivan Doig

Riverhead, 288 pp., $25.95

In his best-selling 2006 novel "The Whistling Season," set on the Montana prairie in 1909, Ivan Doig introduced the fascinating character of Morrie Morris. Young, urban, erudite and carrying the shadow of a mysterious past, Morris electrified the students of his one-room schoolhouse and reinvigorated a prairie community.

It is 10 years later in the Seattle author's new novel, "Work Song," when Morrie steps off the train in the sprawling industrial mining town of Butte, Mont. World War I had ushered in a new century far removed from the prairie homesteads of a decade earlier. Electrification created an instant demand for copper wire. And the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. is hellbent on plundering the world's largest known deposit of copper ore, "the Richest Hill on Earth," to supply it.

Butte at the time is at a frenzied peak of activity. Nearly 100,000 souls, many from across Europe, have flocked to the promise of steady work and the decent pay of $4 and 50 cents a day. Immigrants fill Butte's neighborhoods and swell the union rolls, but the suits at company headquarters hold all of their fates in their ledgers. A proposed pay cut during peak production sets events in motion.

With deft strokes of storytelling, Doig paints a vivid scene.

"[Butte] had witnessed a cat's-cradle of conflicts among the mineworkers union, the Wobblies ... and the Wall Street-run company. There had been strikes and lockouts. Riots. Dynamitings. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company bringing in goon squads. A lynching ... And even that was not the worst of the story."

Morrie can't help but wade into the swim of things, and soon becomes involved with a memorable cast of characters: two old hard-bitten Welsh miners and their young, widowed landlady; a waif; a former student; a union organizer; and a pair of hired thugs right out of central casting. Doig introduces Sam Sandison, a fearsome former ranch baron with a penchant for expensive rare books — and easily the most unforgettable librarian in all of American fiction.

"Work Song" quickly becomes a historical epic with a reach of characters worthy of Dostoevsky. All of them are herded together in a frontier mining town and sealed under the lid of an economic pressure cooker.

As in "The Whistling Season," Morrie finds himself in a pivotal role as forces converge. But as in the earlier book, the ghosts of his past threaten to upend his efforts and place in serious danger the people he cares about most.

Doig takes his time unspooling this tale, and the suspense becomes prolonged as a major strike looms. But the revelations of Sandison and other key characters as the story reaches its climax provide ample reward.

As in the best of Doig's fiction, the historic themes he explores are contemporary, from Wall Street arrogance to immigration, stifled dissent and ethnic mistrust. The safety of working conditions for miners is still in the headlines a century later. And corporate malfeasance resulting in ecological catastrophe (Anaconda's copper smelting poisoned the landscape with arsenic) is playing itself out tragically in the Gulf of Mexico today.

Doig has delivered another compelling tale about America, epic as an Old West saga but as fresh and contemporary as the news.

Tim McNulty's most recent book of poems is "Some Ducks" from Pleasure Boat Studio.