Picking up any Frank Norris book feels like entering a world that is not only gone but also totally forgotten. Popular in his time at the turn of the 20thcentury, his output is not looked upon too fondly in modern times due to his views on race and the blatant anti-Semitism in his work, but it is hard to look at the work of Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis and a lot of the best noir of the 1930’s and not see Norris’s strong influences, from his rich interpretation of the average person and their role in larger society to the grotesque hell he puts them through, Norris was born (and died, at the tender age of 32) way too soon. With The Octopus he is working with a much larger scale then he is with McTeague, which I read last year, this book being nearly twice its size. Through the bloody conflict, based on a real incident of a group of ranchers staging an attack on the government-backed railroad companies in Southern California in the 1880’s, Norris paints a rather brutal picture of progress while never once picking sides, casting both parties as equally greedy in pursuit of their goals. The cast of characters is rather rich, but sometimes one dimensional, with a few standouts being Anixter, one of the ranch owners, whose got the book’s most developed arc as he goes from selfish pragmatist to future father with something to fight for and something to lose and Presley, the obvious stand-in for Norris, whose didactic inner monologues divulge the book’s heart. It’s scenes are memorable as well, like the brutal one near the end detailing the horrid downfall of the family of a minor character and the ending itself which rivals McTeague in its ghoulish comeuppance of one of the book’s villains. A book with a dark heart but with an oddly hopeful message for the world at large, this is a strange, curious forgotten oddity from the early days of Modern America.
Rating: 4/5
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