Author Ivan Doig Delivers a Sparkling Work Song

Ivan Doig (Photo: A. Wayne Arnst)

The author Ivan Doig lives near Richmond Beach, just north of Seattle, but his heart is always in Montana. [Ed: Doig reads at the University Bookstore tomorrow, July 14, at 7 p.m.]

"Mississippi was William Faulkner's muse," Doig said, when we spoke by phone. "I guess Montana is mine."

Montana, specifically the Butte of 1919, is the setting of Doig's newest novel, Work Song, his tenth work of fiction over twenty years. It's a skittish, fast-moving novel that follows the exploits of Morrie Morgan, a dapper dandy with a bit of the scalawag in him. Morrie narrates the story in the best Dickens style; it's the musings of a rogue, and the reader can delight in Morgan's victories both intimate and large. 

Doig's novels are impeccably researched and filled with intriguing characters. In Work Song, his portrait of a frontier Butte is close to perfection. If the Butte of 1919 wasn't like this, it should have been.

"When researching books," he told us, "I like to go where Google doesn’t go. For Work Song, I went to Butte's old archives and dug through the nooks and crannies."

At the Butte Historical Society, he found an old photograph of the Butte Public Library in the early 1920s. That image, he said, "Went off in my mind like a firecracker." The library is a central location in Work Song, a place where Morrie finds a job and learns the town.

The reader follows Morgan as he weaves his way into the city, charms his landlord, the widowed Grace Faraday, and lands odd jobs here and there. He is a wholly original character, at once a walking encyclopedia and a brass-knuckle-carrying hard case. You can feel Doig's love of the character, who first appeared as a secondary player in Doig's earlier novel, The Whistling Season.

"Readers fell in love with him," Doig said. "When he's around, unexpected things happened. Morrie has flights of inspiration. I thought it would be interesting to see things through his eyes."

Doig is clearly a devoted storyteller. When he talks about the characters in his books, he speaks of them as living and breathing souls. Morrie Morgan is a particular type of early-twentieth-century characters. At times, he's a step or two away from the Harold Hill of The Music Man, but you feel he is also a provocateur who likes to stir the pot, not for personal gain, but simply to see how it'll work out. He's restless, easily bored.

In Work Song, Morgan gets involved in a labor dispute involving the miners who embody the socioeconomic heart of Butte and the Anaconda Mining Company. "The company grudgingly paid good wages when unimaginable millions of dollars flowed in from its near-monopoly on copper, and slashed the miners' pay the instant those profits dipped. [...] There had been strikes and lockouts. Riots. Dynamitings. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company bringing in goon squads. A lynching..."

When Doig takes the readers into a mine, you can feel the heat, the sweat, and it's both exhilarating and frightening.

Every so often, the light caught a gleam where water dripped down a rock wall. The stammer of drilling followed us at first, gradually dropping to a distant murmur that was simply in the air, like the metallic smell that smarted in my nose. I kept waiting for where this burrow led to, some larger cavern, timbered and more secure, where actual mining was done. [...] It was hellishly hot; I would not have been surprised to see lava oozing out at us. Every so often, small rocks dribbled down disconcertingly beside us.

Doig believes Morrie is a survivor and he says the character "likely will be back."

Work Song is a excellent book, and one is captured by the characters who all have a simple love of work, a value that seems particularly timely. "People in this book are dedicated to their jobs," says Doig. "It's a validation of labor. With so many people shut out of work right now, I really wanted to include a theme extolling dedication to work."

Doig is a rare man of American letters: he is a non-genre based writer of fiction, and a popular and talented one. He first attracted attention more than 20 years ago with the release of his first novel, The Sea Runners. He was labled a wunderkind, a notion that draws a chuckle from the author. "It was said that I was an overnight sensation, but it was nine years of hard work, writing stories, non-fiction, anything I could get paid for. At one point, I thought I was going to be a journalist."

He credits a supportive wife for sticking with his dream and assisting his work in many ways from research to editing. He takes about two years on each book, writing and researching, and he told me he's nearly finished his next novel. 

Does he have any advice for hopeful fiction writers? "Keep writing. I recommend that writers keep a journal, a daily diary. Make a habit of working with words. Everyday. But be aware that you’re never finished evolving as a writer. I'm still figuring it out at times."