Phil Burbank is a man’s man. Now “just forty,” unlike anyone else on the ranch, he doesn’t wear gloves for the many tasks he performs on the ranch: castrating cattle, “roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay,” etc. He ignores “the blisters, cuts and splinters” he gets on his calloused hands and “scorned those who wore gloves to protect themselves.” He gets his hair cut three times a year, bathes “once a month in a deep hole in the creek” except in the winter when he doesn’t bathe at all. Paradoxically, “his was a keen, sharp, inquiring mind—an engaged mind—that confounded cattle buyers and salesmen who supposed that one who dressed as Phil dressed, who talked as Phil talked, must be simple and illiterate.” George, Phil’s younger brother by two years and the other “half-owner of the biggest ranch in the valley,” couldn’t be more different. “George was a stocky, humorless, decent man” and while “Phil had been the bright one,” George was “the plodder.” With “no hobbies, no lively interests,” George had “never caught fire, seldom even smoked.” Still, they make a life of it together after their parents retire and “had taken off to spend their autumn years in a suite of rooms in the best hotel in Salt Lake City.” It is on their twenty-fifth year together, driving cattle from the southwest Montana plains in 1924 that Phil realizes that something is ailing George who has “been funny all summer.” “…there’d been something sour about the whole drive. Exactly what, he couldn’t tell. Was it age… Had the times got out of hand?” Little does Phil and George realize just how much their life is about to change and how it will never be the same again.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Valerie Sayers declares “if there were justice (or better taste) in the literary marketplace, surely one or another of Thomas Savage’s dozen novels would be topping bestseller lists for the past 30-odd years… He deserves to be discovered by more readers.” Pulitzer Prize winning writer Annie Proulx states that THE POWER OF THE DOG “is the fifth and, for some readers, including this one, the best of Savage’s thirteen novels, a psychological study frightened with drama and tension…”
After spending twenty pages establishing the relationship between Phil and George Burbank, Savage (April 25, 1915 – July 25, 2003) turns his attention to a different family: the Gordons. John Gordon, idealistic and hard-working, and his wife, Rose, establish themselves in the small town of Beech, Montana, where John begins to practice medicine. “His patients were the dryland farmers behind the hills whose lives somehow paralleled his; they had been lured West by colored handbills printed by the railroads.” Wealthy ranchers can afford to go to the larger town of Herndon for medical services where they can also shop and dine, and Gordon soon finds his dreams of success crumbling with patients who often cannot afford to pay him. Adding to the Gordons’ worries is their son, Peter, who is “late in walking and late in talking” and who, when he does start to walk, “walking was a painfully acquired skill and not a human instinct.” When he talks, he speaks with “a faint lisp in measured, adult cadences.” Seeing his life as a failure, John Gordon’s descent into alcoholism and depression is disturbing and touching as described by Savage.
Thomas Savage has a lot to offer readers in THE POWER OF THE DOG: realistic characters and situations, vivid settings, tense and emotional scenes that grab the reader, and a smooth narrative style. Savage combines character and landscape just as effectively as does Willa Cather and John Steinbeck. Above all, however, Savage has a keen sense of observation when it comes to human emotions and feelings as well as a first-rate means of expressing in writing his observations. Savage’s skillful and succinct description of George’s feelings for Rose and his ability to feel love for the first time at the age of thirty-eight is but one example of Savage’s adroit handling of his art. The explosive interplay between Rose and Phil and Peter and Phil once the bride and her less than manly son come to live on the Burbank ranch with George turns the novel into a masterpiece of human drama.
The warfare that Phil declares against his brother’s wife stems from more than the fact that Phil feels trapped because the Burbank house and the money belong equally to the two brothers. The ranch can’t be spilt up “without causing financial troubles, water rights, grazing land and so forth.” More injurious is the fact that Rose’s presence and the marriage between Rose and George has totally upset and altered Phil and George’s long-established way of live and the sense of affinity between the two brothers. Phil, much like Thomas Savage himself, is also a master observer of human nature, he knows what makes people tick. His war against Rose and her “Little Lord Fauntleroy” of a son pits a cold, callous, Machiavelli-like intelligence against the two intruders. Deeper still at the heart of the conflict which becomes central to the novel is the fact that George has found something that Phil never has and feels as though he never will: love. Thus, Savage’s portrait of the complex person that is Phil Gordon becomes the novel’s focus and readers will find themselves both intrigued with and reacting in various fashion to this most multi-dimensional of characters.
Phil puts into motion a most cunning and despicable plan to drive the intruders out and restore life to what it was before George married Rose. In so doing readers become aware of another trait of Phil Burbank—a trait hinted at throughout the book and one that the rugged individualist has gone to great effort to conceal—from others as well as himself. Revelations about Phil Burbank, however, are nothing compared to the sudden, shocking, and very chilling conclusion of THE POWER OF THE DOG —with an astonishing final paragraph that will leave most readers literally gasping.
THE POWER OF THE DOG is a tour de force not to be missed. The 2001 Back Bay edition of the novel includes an informative “Afterword” by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx (THE SHIPPING NEWS, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, etc.) that discusses Savage’s life and work.
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Reviews with images
An absolute classic
People are divided over the movie but the book is brilliant! Magnificent prose, the descriptions of the landscape breathtaking, the characters complex, every gesture measured. This is a psychological study dealing with homophobia and repressed homosexuality in a masculine ranch world. An interior tragedy. The terrible loneliness and achingly painful west is captured. An absolute classic masterpiece, a work of literary art, it is the father of Brokeback Mountain.Your writing is SAVAGE, Thomas!
Top reviews from other countries
Anita Flegg
A very good book, but hard to read at times
Reviewed in Canada on May 14, 2022
P. Maurischat
Great book! If you still can, read it before watching the movie
Reviewed in Germany on February 23, 2022