[In the following review, Scannell finds Legends of the Fall to be a horribly written book.]

“Legends of the Fall” is the title-story of a volume containing three novellas by Jim Harrison who, the blurb tells us, “has already won literary acclaim in the States for his poetry and novels”. The jacket also carries some extracts from admiring American reviewers of the book, including these words from that notable arbiter of literary excellence, Playboy: “These three novellas are so good and so well crafted, it's a little scary … You have to be very goddamned good to write that way.”

It is perhaps worth quoting the opening sentence of the first of the stories, “Revenge”: “You could not tell if you were a bird descending (and there was a bird descending, a vulture) if the naked man was dead or alive.” What Harrison wishes to say is clear enough—though it took me two or three readings to be quite sure—but the manner of its saying is extraordinarily clumsy, and indeed an elephantine clumsiness is a feature of this author's style. It seems that he is resolved not to say anything directly, and his painful circumlocutions and torturing of syntax are not so much evidence of the writer's “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings” as a self-conscious attempt to claim a depth of thought and feeling which is in fact lamentably absent, as when, a few pages later he writes: “It's not necessary to know too much about the man who was wounded so badly because he was wounded badly enough to alter his course of life radically, somewhat in the manner that conversion, the sacrament of baptism, not the less an upheaval for being commonplace, alters the Christian, satori the Buddhist.” You have to be very goddamned bad to write that way.

Beneath the pretentious waffle of his first novella here, “Revenge”, is a crude tale of pathological violence and sex, a melange of sadism and mawkish slop, with a conclusion so preposterously melodramatic and sentimental that laughter almost defuses the nausea. But not quite. The second novella, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name”, is about a character called Nordstrom who attends dancing classes as part of his university education, becomes a wealthy businessman, marries, divorces and gives away most of his worldly possessions, kills a hoodlum who is trying to intimidate him and becomes a cook in a sea-food restaurant in Florida. I think Harrison is trying to con his readers into accepting this rubbish as some kind of allegory of thwarted ambition, of disillusionment with, or renunciation of, the things of this world. But the truth is that, like “Revenge” the story is a mishmash of brutality, sentimentality and absurd pretentiousness.

The last of the novellas, the title-story, is a little different in intention but no less painful to read. In the words of the blurb, “this tale of high adventure and romantic obsession ranges back to the 1870s and forward to 1977”. It reads like an inept treatment for a movie that mercifully never got made. Ill-written, trite, and maudlin, all three of these stories would seem to be products of a vulgar, dubiously illiterate and rather unpleasant mind.