5. What does Angus’s love of verse, and his habit of quoting it, say about his personality? What does he seek by turning to poetry and song? What effect does Doig achieve by peppering the book with Scottish verse? What special significance lies in the lyrics of “Dancing at the Rascal Fair,” which the author composed to serve as the book’s title?
6. Doig believes that “writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life.” Yet, setting is anything but a passive backdrop in Doig’s fiction. How does the grandeur of Montana dwarf the lives of the characters or make them seem more expansive and dramatic? How does the unpredictable Montana climate parallel the stormy relationships depicted in the book?
7. Angus remarks that “the Atlantic was a child’s teacup compared to the ocean that life could be.” Discuss the water imagery throughout the book, from Rob and Angus’s transatlantic voyage to the droughts the homesteaders suffer to Rob’s eventual fate.
8. Throughout the book, Rob and Angus worry over the “perils that sheep invite on themselves.” Describe the parallel between the sheep, with all their promise and vulnerability, and the homesteaders who tend them.
9. Do you believe that Anna truly loved both Isaac and Angus, or was she simply sparing Angus’s feelings when she told him she would know where to turn if her marriage went awry? If Anna lived through the influenza epidemic, would she and Angus have re-ignited their relationship?
10. Angus calls his marriage to Adair a “truce.” Discuss the ways in which Doig explores the interplay of obligation, compromise, loyalty, and affection in their marriage. For which of these two victims of unrequited love do you feel the most sympathy? Considering Adair’s knowledge that she is not Angus’s true love and her admission that she is ill-suited for homesteading life, why does she stay so long in Montana? In the end, did you find Angus and Adair’s relationship practical and companionable or tragic and sad?
11. How does Doig develop Rob and Angus’s lifelong friendship? Trace its arc over the decades. How realistically does Doig depict the eventual rift between them? What do you think caused the drastic change in Rob’s personality toward the end of his life?
12. In the final chapter, Angus reflects: “Hard ever to know, whether time is truly letting us see from the pattern of ourselves into those next to us.” What does this novel say, finally, about the mysteries of human relationships and the human heart?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The grandson of homesteaders and the son of a ranch hand and a ranch cook, Ivan Doig was born in Montana in 1939. He grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front that has inspired much of his writing, making it into his own equivalent of Faulkner’s “Western Yoknap-atawpha,” according to reviewers. His first book, the highly acclaimed memoir This House of Sky (1978), was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his eight books since then have received numerous prizes.
A former ranch hand and newspaperman, Doig is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he received a B.S. and an M.S. in journalism. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington and honorary doctorates in literature from Montana State University and Lewis and Clark College. In the century’s-end San Francisco Chronicle polls to name the best Western novels and works of nonfiction, Doig is the only living writer with books in the top dozen on both lists: English Creek for fiction and This House of Sky for nonfiction. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Carol, who has taught the literature of the American West.
Dancing at the Rascal Fair is part of Doig’s Two Medicine trilogy, which follows the fate of the McCaskill family in America. English Creek resumes the trilogy in 1939, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana leaves the McCaskills in 1989. Doig’s latest novel, Mountain Time, is a contemporary novel with sisters Mariah and Lexa McCaskill as major characters.
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Montana-born IVAN DOIG has been a ranch hand, newspaperman, magazine editor, and writer. He is the author of six other novels, including Prairie Nocturne, and three works of nonfiction. In 1989 he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association. He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Carol.
THE MONTANA TRILOGY consists of English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana.
ALSO BY IVAN DOIG
Fiction
Prairie Nocturne
Mountain Time
Bucking the Sun
Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
English Creek
The Sea Runners
Nonfiction
Heart Earth
Winter Brothers
This House of Sky
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Ivan Doig
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
Cover illustration by Owen Smith
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doig, Ivan.
Dancing at the rascal fair / Ivan Doig.
p. cm.
1. Montana—Fiction. 2. Scots—Montana—Fiction. 3. Frontier and pioneer life—Montana—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.0415D36 1996
813'.54-dc20 96-23018
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-83105-3
ISBN-10: 0-684-83105-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2494-9 (ebook)
The King’s Remembrancer scenes copyright © 1987 by Ivan Doig, quoted by permission of the author.
Contents
Epigraph
Scotland and Helena
Gros Ventre
Scotch Heaven
The ’Steaders
Two Medicine
1918
1919
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
About Ivan Doig