Strange as this Weather Has Been

Every year the college I commute to has a "common book" provided free to all first-year students and discussed in the first-year writing class. This year it's Strange as this Weather Has Been, by Ann Pancake. Now, I love the idea of a common book. I always read it enthusiastically and enjoy using it to demonstrate the difference between leading a discussion on a novel I've read once and don't necessarily agree with or love, versus the more usual discussions on novels I've read twice or more and love enough to assign. This one was on a topic wholly unfamiliar to me, mountaintop removal mining for coal in West Virginia.

Ann Pancake is against mountaintop removal mining, and the purpose of her novel is to make you feel the pain of the people whose land is being destroyed by it. So it has a didactic tone from the start, plus recommendations for protest websites in the acknowledgments at the end. (Pancake's own website provides additional links.)

The story is told in alternating chapters by various characters, mostly Lace, a W.VA native who quit college after her first semester because she was homesick and got pregnant by a local boy on her first visit home ("don't try this, first-years"), and her children, Bant, Dane, and Corey. Lace and Bant spend most of their time coming to terms with the idea that mining has destroyed the environment of their home and trying to come up with a response. They educate themselves about the local mining operations, but they don't know enough about science to tell propaganda from truth. Their version of the truth is local; it doesn't go beyond identifying and using plants and animals native to the area. Bant utters the title phrase, trying to link global warming to the mining operations on nearby mountains:
"Anymore, seemed there was either too much water or too little, the temperature too high or too low. 'Strange as this weather has been,' people would say, or 'With this crazy weather we've been having.' And I knew Lace believed the weather was linked to the rest of this mess, but I wasn't sure how."

Corey, who has grown up with machinery rather than nature, is attracted to the mining machinery:
"finally he'd scale Big John. That vast mountain-handling piece of gorgeous machinery. And as Corey climbs it, the smell of its fluids the good grease he'd get on his clothes. And maybe he'd cut himself a little on something. Maybe he'd bleed a little there. He'd crawl in, settle in the seat, take a look at how it ran, push his legs to the pedals, grip sticks and handles. That giant, his body in that gigantic body, his body running that body, and the size, the power of that machine: inside Big John, Corey can change the shape of the world. Corey can."
But Corey's attraction to machinery eventually results in his doom, and even though I'm sympathetic to the environmental message of this novel, that irritates me. It seems heavy-handed, although perhaps it's a tribute to the power of Pancake's characterization that I care.

The character of Avery, a neighbor of Lace's who left W. Va. for college and a job in Cleveland, irritates me too, because he seems to be invented solely for the purpose of showing what is lost when someone learns to speak "standard" English and value anything outside his mountain home. (What an anti-education novel this is, to assign to college students who are just starting out!) Avery also serves as a mouthpiece for the author, as he studies and describes various mining disasters and tells his own personal (and horrifying) story of surviving one.

Despite the heavy-handed propagandizing and the occasional mouthpiece character, though, this novel succeeds in getting me interested in the characters and, through them, a subject I had no interest in before. As Lace says, late in the novel,
"It hurt to learn it, it did. It was easier to half-ignore it, pretend it wasn't that bad, anyway, or if it was, couldn't do nothing about it so why get worked up, that's how a lot of people lived. But I realized to at least know part of what was going on made you feel like you had a particle of control instead of none at all."

As an adult, I've always been a proponent of nuclear energy, but reading a novel like this one gives me new impetus to vote against the use of coal wherever I can. That's going to have to be enough, at least for now. Because I want to feel that particle of control, rather than ignore something once it's been brought to my attention. Have you ever heard of mountaintop removal mining before this? Does it give you that fatalistic feeling that it's yet another thing you should be doing something about but you're not ready to get worked up about it now when there are so many other things that seem more urgent?