When I did get around to reading Charles Bowden I was certainly not disappointed. His true crime books about border issues, particularly the drug wars- Murder City, El Sicario, Dreamland, A Shadow In the City- are unparalleled. And his books about the desert are as evocative as they are heartfelt. All of which are beautifully rendered. You can pretty choose a paragraph at random, like the one I came across over breakfast this morning:
"Down in the pit some heavy metal band is thrashing out harmonics and a small mob of kids is slam dancing in the afternoon sun. Young women walk past with blank eyes, tattoos, large breasts and a perfume that kills hope with one whiff. The young men shuffle past with homicide eyes. I am staring into the triumph of the industrial revolution, complete with cleavage. Here are all the people no factory whistle calls."

It is, at the title indicates, a tribute to Abbey, that cantankerous author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, amongst many others. Abbey, the conflicted writer, and, as Kris Kristofferson put it all those years ago, "a walking contradiction/partly truth and partly fiction." Not to mention Abbey the reluctant spokesperson for any number of radical environmental activists, "monkey-wrenchers" as they are called in the parlance.


"To unravel something, you have to have as thesis. But to understand the dead ends, back alleys, and side roads of life itself, you have to mistrust your thesis and constantly keep an eye on it lest it blind you to detail, contradiction, lust, love, and loneliness. I can't write about a friend and make it neat and tidy until I intend to kill my friend. And this is not my intention."
If you like Red Caddy, you will certainly want to read two other recently published University of Texas/Lannan Bowden books: Desert: Memoirs of the Future, originally published in 1991, and Red Line, originally published in 1989. Both seem as relevant now as when they were first appeared. With Bowden's voice, the one I first heard on the BBC all those years ago, coming through on every page, the reader quickly realises that these days Tuscon's desert rat, the man with the pet rattlesnake, is missed more than ever. While Miles might have been able to tell the worth of a particular musician by the way he carried himself, for a writer, it's the way he or she talks- the tone and ability to vocalise a world view- that matters. That's I see in Charles Bowden and what Bowden saw in his friend Edward Abbey.
"He lived in a moral universe. Beneath all the sexist barbs, the racist wit, the meanness, the pranks, the stunts, the anger, the episodes, the constant laughter and mirth, he inhabited and consciously expanded a moral universe. One where cleverness and normal standards of success don't count for much but right and wrong count for pretty much everything. Ah, one life at a time, please, but still a real life."