The Rope by Nevada Barr

A prequel to Barr's popular National Park series featuring National Park law enforcement ranger, Anna Pigeon, this is not Barr's strongest work. A friend and I were speculating that it may be an early writing that is only now being published.

This features a younger Anna on the run from NYC and theater after the death of her husband. Anna has taken on seasonal work at Glen Canyon. Her job, with housemate, Jenny Gorman, is cleaning up the human waste deposited by indifferent tourists in one of the most amazing settings on earth. Charming. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that drew its water supply from that particular resevoir; I hope I haven't. The continual discussion of people poop was not pleasant - however accurate it may have been.

Barr does a brilliant job of giving the uninitiated (me, for example) a sense of the nature of the place. I've seen pictures, and that surface reality is amazing enough - sheer rock walls rising from an immense body of water. But from pictures it is hard to capture a sense of the depth and character of the place. I'm not particularly comfortable with large bodies of water, and I am more accustomed to naturally occuring lakes - or even partially artificial lakes like Lake Ponchartrain which is crossed by the longest bridge in the world. According to the wiki, the average depth of Lake Ponchartrain is 12 to 14 feet, and I believe I was once told that out under the middle of that bridge the depth of the water is 75 to 80 feet. The water in Glen Canyon is 7 to 8 hundred feet deep in places - and those places are not all "out in the middle." By the time she has finished, you get it.

Unfortunately, the whole thing seemed rather unfocused to me. Too many characters, too many plot twists, too many side issues which led nowhere. One of the most likeable characters is Anna's supervisor/partner/housemate, Jenny. Why did Barr make Jenny a lesbian? The fact that Jenny is a lesbian is not the problem, it is just that it truly does not contribute to the plot at all and requires a great deal of otherwise unnecessary discussion and explanation. Barr works it in, sort of, but there were simpler ways to accomplish the tasks that this sideline addressed.

Oh well, a lesser effort from Barr is still better than many people's best.