Megan Riley McGilchrist has written a thoroughly researched, well-written and persuasive account of the role of landscape in the works of Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner. This book is divided into three parts, the first of which is given over to an excellent overview of the role of landscape, and particularly the “Myth of the Frontier” in the formation of “the cultural and ideological practices which accompanied it” (11). McGilchrist uses this established mythology to clearly designate the land as “female,” as something to be desired by the gaze of the (European, male) colonizers (11). The crux of McGilchrist's argument, she claims, is that McCarthy and Stegner are writing “either side of the cultural watershed of the 1960s” and that this positioning goes some way to explaining Stegner's proto-environmentalism and McCarthy's indictment of John Grady's colonizing pursuit of both Alejandra and, moreover, the ownership of land she represents (12).

Academic scene-setting done, McGilchrist moves on to examine Stegner's work. McGilchrist's main argument sees Stegner's search for “safe places” as key to understanding the writer as both environmental author and, perhaps more contentiously, feminist writer. The case for Stegner as environmental writer is convincingly made, especially during the discussions of Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose. Whether or not this sensitive depiction of the environment and environmental issues, which was undeniably ahead of its time, equates to a feminist perspective depends upon how far and how unproblematically a reader is prepared to accept McGilchrist's land-as-female contention. What is convincing, however, is McGilchrist's examination of Stegner's surprisingly well-formed female characters, to whom and to whose (perhaps stereotypical) issues Stegner devotes a great deal of attention.

McGilchrist argues that Stegner's characters’ search for safe, domestic, places to protect is shown to be an ultimately futile one. Stegner's women are continuously frustrated in their attempts to establish these safe places by the acquisitive nature and restlessness of their menfolk. However, Stegner's project is shown to be less an indictment of America's founding mythology than of McCarthy's post-Vietnam perspective. Written after Vietnam, McCarthy's “western” works are, according to McGilchrist, part of a worldview which had suffered a total “loss of connection with the mythic substructure which had held up many of America's most deeply held beliefs” in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (116). A convincing argument is again made here, claiming that McCarthy, more so than Stegner, has an uneasy relationship with America's expansionist, if not outright imperialist, policies. After all, McGilchrist points out, the land John Grady and Rawlins travel into is not the unclaimed wilderness of Big Rock Candy Mountain, but an already inhabited and owned place, already colonized by others before the cowboys arrive. McGilchrist casts John Grady as far from the innocent and naive adventurer he has sometimes been seen to be. Rather, McCarthy's protagonist is seen as a “spoiled child,” with very definite “eyes for the spread” he will inherit by marrying Alejandra (154). McGilchrist thus “claims” John Grady as a kind of antifeminist antihero, interested in acquiring both the land owned by Alejandra's father and “all the pretty horses” he will gain with it. John Grady himself therefore becomes part of McCarthy's overall indictment of the kind of frontier myth McGilchrist outlined in her introduction and which McCarthy seeks to trouble in his “border trilogy.”

The argument then shifts as McGilchrist goes on to discuss what she terms McCarthy's “optical democracy,” which is offered as an alternative to the feminizing of landscape typical of earlier writers and myth-makers. In this kind of democracy, an “equality of all things” according to McGilchrist, “everything is as meaningful, or meaningless, as everything else” (193). McGilchrist argues that such equality removes the dominance of the human perspective, with the result that the landscape resists feminizing just as the hostile landscapes of Blood Meridian resist the presence of Glanton's scalp-hunters. This line of argument is very promising, and I would perhaps like to have seen a little more page-time spent on it, as it seems to offer a way to rescue McCarthy's writing from accusations of misogyny which still seem to dog it.

McGilchrist's book would, I feel, be a useful text to students of both McCarthy's and Stegner's work, as well as those interested in eco-criticism or in looking into the discussion surrounding female characters in “western” works. By linking Stegner's novels to the contemporary work of eco-critics and attempting to claim him as a proto-feminist, McGilchrist opens up anew an extremely interesting way of looking at an established, if sometime unfairly pigeonholed, writer. Equally, the comments offered here on John Grady's pursuit of “all the pretty horses” and McCarthy's optical democracy add a new dimension to the established criticism on McCarthy's engagement with myth and his oft-criticized depiction of women.