Montana 1948
Plot
Setting
Key characters
Themes
Key quotes
Plot
Prolog: David as an adult looking back on the events of 1948 and how he remembers 3
important people his father his mother and Marie little soldier
Part one: we are introduced to the town and the post war way of life of the people in the
town of Bentrock. Then Marie little soldier gets sick and needs to see a doctor but when
Gail suggests she sees uncle frank she does not want to see him, but she is convinced to
see him anyway. After the visit the first allegations of sexual abuse surface about frank.
Part two: Wes begins to investigate the allegations and the evidence starts to build against
frank. Wes confronts his grandfather about it and is not fazed by it at all and try to get
Wes to stop the investigation. But a few days later Marie little solider is murdered and
frank is the prime suspect.
Part three: Wes arrests frank for sexual assault and instead of taking him to the station he
locks him up in the basement. Julian comes around to the house and is extremely angry
and demands frank to be released now but Wes refuses. Julian is not satisfied and sends
a few men that work for him around to the house to brake him out but it is unsuccessful.
Frank is finally over come by the whole situation and kills himself.
Epilogue: franks crimes are suppressed by the family and then David's family move away
from bentrock to the city.
Setting
The book is set in the town of Bentrock
which is in northwest Montana
very close to the Canadian border.
The land around there is very harsh
it is hard to farm and the weather is
tuff. The area has a history of
cowboys and Indians and there is
still racism in the community. The
time is 1948 which is just after the
second world war and it is a time
when everybody in the community
is just trying to settle down and get
on with life because there where
many men in the town that fought
in the war.
Key characters
Julian: is David's grandfather and Wes’s father, he was the owner of a cattle ranch and then
was the town sheriff before passing it onto his son, he was a controlling man who
needed power which is why he became the sheriff. He also sees frank as his only son
and wishes that Wes would be more like his brother.
Frank: frank is Wes's only brother, he is a doctor and a decorated war hero and was highly
regarded in the community. He has a wife but they never had any children. But he
sexually abuses young Indian women and was suspected of Marie little soldiers murder.
Len McCurly: was Wes's deputy and lived next door to him and before that was Julian's
deputy. He is a true western man with true western values, but likes whisky a little bit to
much. It is also hinted in the book that he is secretly in love with Wes's wife.
David: at the start of the book David is a normal young boy, he is old enough to know that
having the Hayden name makes him known amongst the community but it doesn’t really
worry him. But as the book progresses he grows up and matures very quickly and by the
end of the book he is much older than twelve, this event was sort of a right of passage
for David, when he becomes a man.
themes
The key themes of this novel are family break downs and how
the effect the individuals and the relation ships in the
group. Another theme is the idea of a flawed hero which is
frank, he was a decorated war hero and a doctor but at the
same time sexually abused Indian girls. racism in this
novel is present with the white people in the town looking
down on the Indians. Another theme in this novel is the
loss of innocence in childhood, at the start of the book
David was a young innocent boy but by the end of the
book he had been exposed to so much and he had to
mature very quickly.
Key quotes
When David shoots the magpie pg 81
Looking in the dead bird’s eye, I realized that these strange, unthought-of
connections - sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation
- are there, there, deep in even a good heart’s chambers. This is when
David starts to lose his innocence.
At the end of the novel
Don’t blame Montana, don’t ever blame Montana. This is at the end of the
novel and Wes is saying that the culture of the town was not
responsible for franks actions and that it was frank who was
responsible but the towns culture had a lot to do with it, with the
racism, and the fact that his father was the town sheriff.
During the wedding trip to Minneapolis
They couldn’t arrest us we are the law. Julian points a gun at a man at a
bar and then afterwards laughs at it this so the lack of respect that they
have for the law.
What I learnt
I learnt about the similarities that of the native
Americans and the Australian aboriginals.