The decline of the West

‘This is a work of non-fiction,’ Alexandra Fuller writes. ‘But I have taken narrative liberties with the text.’ She presents a fictionalised account of the life and early death of one man to personify the tragedy of a whole generation in the modern American West, which is no place for John Wayne heroics. With the force of an emotional novel, this dramatised biography is a polemic against the energy industry’s spoliation of the high plains of Wyoming and the dangerous exploitation of the men who drill there for oil and gas. The book is a panegyric to an austerely beautiful land and a lament for the pioneer cowboys’ descendants, now economically compelled to risk their lives as roughnecks on the oil rigs.

Most popular

Rupert Darwall

Labour has walked into a net-zero trap of its own making

Fuller was born in England in 1969. Three years later, her family moved to a Rhodesian farm, where three siblings died in childhood, accidentally and by natural causes.