Who hasn’t felt like blowing things up from time to time? I know I have, not that I would actually do something like that. I don’t want to end up in jail and it probably wouldn’t do much to make the world a better place in the long run anyways. Besides, my weapon-making skills are non-existent, I’m clumsy, have shaky hands, and can’t tell the difference between saltpetre and cialis so you wouldn’t want to be near me while I’m carrying a box of high-powered explosives. But really, if you haven’t fantasized about blowing something up at some point in your life, you’re probably not paying much attention to what’s happening in the world. Edward Abbey was certainly paying attention to the destruction of nature and he felt like blowing things up. Instead of doing that, he wrote a counter-cultural novel called The Monkey Wrench Gang and it is all about people who blow things up. It is hard not to cheer them on along the way even though it is obvious from the beginning they are on a quixotic mission.
During a white water rafting trip in Utah, four trickster-type individuals start drinking by their campfire and talk about how great it would be to sabotage all the industrial development taking place across the American Southwest. One is the rafting guide, Seldom Seen Smith, a Mormon with questionable morals and marginal commitments to the Church of LSD, oops I mean LDS. He is basically a clever redneck who wants to preserve nature as it is without the intrusive exploitation of the capitalist system. Doc Sarvis is a surgeon who is fed up with having to treat patients suffering from diseases and injuries caused by the chemicals and pollutants of the modern world. His much younger lover, Bonnie Abzug, no relation to Bella Abzug, is a Jewish hippy feminist from New York who just wants to burn down civilization and start everything over from scratch. Then there is Hayduke, a crude and primitive-minded wildman who just returned from Vietnam. He wants revenge for the nightmare of living through the war and sees a parallel between the way the US military invaded Southeast Asia and the way big corporations are invading the American wilderness. He wants to free himself from society and live like an animal in the desert. His name is derived from “hajduk” which, in Slavic and other Eastern European languages means “outlaw”. Each one represents a different facet of the environmental movement as it was in the 1970s and one of this novel’s strengths is that these are the most memorable characters ever created by this author. While their conversations and personalities alternate between clashing and harmonizing with a lot of punning and humor along the way, they fit together like pieces of a multi-dimensional puzzle.
Another of the novel’s strengths is the descriptive language. Abbey was famous for his ability to describe the deserts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and he never fails to deliver in that regard in this book. He engages all your senses to make it feel as if you are there, experiencing what the characters experience, feeling the wind they feel, walking where they walk, hiding behind the trees and rocks they use for cover, feeling the vastness of the starry desert sky and being absorbed into that stillness and quietude that one can only feel in the depths of that part of North America. And he describes industrial machinery and the development it brings with just as much detail. Obviously he took great care to use language for the construction of ugly, intrusive human inventions for the sake of taking grim delight in their destruction at the hands of the four heroes.
The plot is minimal and basic. The gang make plans to sabotage whatever machinery they can find, albeit without killing anybody, and proceed to do so. They get pursued throughout the desert by a posse of law enforcement villains and vigilantes who are more concerned with exploiting the land for money than they actually are with justice. All the while, the quartet of eco-warriors know they don’t have a chance of succeeding in tearing down civilization, but they feel compelled to keep monkey wrenching until they get caught.
There are some downsides to the writing. The main characters are brutally racist towards Native American people and politically correct readers of today will definitely whine about the sexist portrayal of Bonnie Abzug. This is a very macho, hyper-masculine novel, although in some ways that is part of its appeal. There was a time when American Leftists actually did have the balls to go toe to toe with the system, unlike today’s useless army of woke wimps who think that “online activism” is actually going to do some good in the world. Yeah, if you actually care about the world you should get off your social media asses and figure out ways to cancel global warming instead of bickering with inconsequential MAGA maggots on Twitter. But then again, there are times when the Monkey Wrench Gang come across as naive and a bit stupid too; for four people who care about preserving nature, they should be smart enough to know that burning construction equipment in the high esert, pushing earth movers into a lake, and blowing up bridges will do a hell of a lot of damage to the environment they want to protect.
But The Monkey Wrench Gang is a big wish-fulfillment fantasy. I don’t think it is meant to be taken in any other way, except maybe as a call to (responsible) action. This is, after all, the book that inspired the Earth First activist group. It really is an action-adventure story that reads like an updated, 1970s version of the traditional Western genre, complete with rough and tumble, whisky drinking, cigar chomping, poker playing outlaws who learn how to stick it to the lawman. They bomb construction sites rather than robbing banks and the whole thing reads like Abbey hoped someday this would be made into a movie. Not a chance of that happening today since the colossally big corporations that run the world now would never stand for any kind of entertainment that might inspire people to fight the system. Is it any surprise that Hollywood seems to be making nothing but junk food for the 21st century mind these days? Anything that dazzles the senses and prevents people from thinking benefits the big shots at the top of the human society shit pile. There is plenty of room for destructive fantasies in our culture, especially when they critique our way of living or provide a means of catharsis. You can cheer this gang on as they sabotage machinery the same way you cheer on Tyler Durden when he blows uo the bank at the end of Fight Club.
Maybe it’s time for somebody to write a good science-fiction novel about blowing up the internet. There are millions of times I’ve fantasized about doing that.
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