I will include in this review a quotation from the book, something I usually do not do, but the writing is so remarkable and fine that it can best be explained by example. First, a note about the two principals, Clair and Mason, who have started a journey to Mexico to study native plant life and photograph a threat to the well-being of the whales who mate off the coast of the Baja peninsula. Their relationship is often rocky but always returns to a quiet acceptance of the faults of each and an unspoken promise to continue. Each one carries a burden of guilt from occurrences for which neither can atone, and which are beyond their ability to dispel.

“There are people who never quite believe in death, who feel somehow that because it is so contradictory to life, a stillness that cannot last beside the stir of being, that it simply cannot really be so. For them, the loss of someone beloved ushers in a living version of death, and gradually they themselves pass into the nonlife, staggered by the reality and never assuredly to reclaim their footing.”

Using careful, complex prose clearly produced after much contemplation and the exercise of the author’s art, Stegner uses the many meanings of words to illuminate the increasingly dire circumstances the couple face as they confront men who care only for power and money, while their love affair mirrors the peaks and valleys of their professional endeavors. Meeting friends and allies, casual acquaintances good and evil, the common folk of Mexico and the friends/not friends of both Mexican and American consulate officials, they carom from place to place, from discomfort to outright peril. The landscape, mostly bleak, and cultural difficulties complicate their admittedly fraught mission to highlight wrongs done to the earth and its creatures. Heat, hunger and thirst, social prejudice, personal conflicts and occasional romantic encounters liven the narrative and help maintain a sense of suspense and tension that carries through the book. The theme of guilt, for perceived wrongs, wrongs done and suffered, invisible and pervasive threads throughout the work and adds a bitter piquancy to everything: love, hate, worry, triumph.

Written with great care and masterful craftsmanship this novel has much to say about men and women, the earth and its rapists, and ultimately about the ongoing struggle to do the right thing. It is a worthy work and will surely be lauded as both a fine novel and a meaningful polemic about the environment.