Niven Busch’s The Furies

I recently bought the Criterion DVD of Anthony Mann’s 1950 western The Furies and included as an extra is Niven Busch’s 1948 novel of the same name. Not a digital copy but an actual paperback. Since I loved the movie so much I naturally had to read the book. Busch also wrote the novel on which the outrageous Duel in the Sun was based so I figured he was a writer I needed to check out.

The setting is the late 1880s. T.C. Jefford owns a vast cattle empire in New Mexico. He’s a ruthless larger-than-life character. He has two sons but he considers them (rightly) to be weaklings and of no account. His nineteen-year-old daughter Vance is another matter. She has the potential to be T.C.’s successor.

While T.C. has a lot of land and a lot of cattle he’s cash-poor and has to raise a loan from the bank. The problem is that the bank is reluctant to accept his ranch as security because of the hundreds of squatters living there. They’ve been there for generations, they have no intention of leaving and they make a living from thieving. These problems will have momentous consequences later in the story.

He has told his daughter that she is free to marry any man she chooses but he has attached some very tricky conditions to his offer. In practice if she wants to own the ranch one day she’ll have to marry a man approved of by her father. She has been having an affair with one of the squatters, Juan Herrera. She’s prepared to give Juan up to please her father but she’s not so sure about giving up her next suitor, a gambler named Darragh. Old T.C. is too clever to forbid the marriage but he comes up with a devious plan to expose Darragh as a fortune-hunter.

The real trouble starts when T.C. brings his mistress Flo home to the ranch. It’s obvious to Vance that Flo intends to get her hands on T.C.’s entire fortune. It’s also obvious to Vance that that will mean that she will end up with nothing. Vance does not intend to stand by and let that happen. There’s going to be a power struggle between these two women and tensions rise when T.C. announces that he intends to marry Flo.

That power struggle leads to a dramatic and shocking incident. As a result Vance flees the ranch. Vance’s efforts to build a new life end in disaster and she (quite correctly) blames her father. Vance now decides that she has a score to settle and she has a clever plan to achieve that objective.

The focus of the novel is the strange, obsessive, passionate and unhealthy relationship between T.C. and Vance. There’s certainly a hint of something incestuous in the relationship. T.C. has had plenty of women but the woman who dominates his whole life is his daughter. Vance has love affairs and she has sexual relationships with two men but no man can ever measure up to her father. It’s implied that the strange bond between father and daughter is the reason that T.C. feels no emotional bond with any of his other women and it’s the reason Vance’s relationships with other men end in failure.

The major theme of the novel is that love can turn to hate but when you hate someone whom you once loved the love doesn’t just disappear. It remains, inextricably entangled with the hate. And the more intense the love, the more intense the hate. Both T.C. and Vance are entirely consumed by these dangerous mixtures of love and hate.

A minor but important theme is rivalry between women. Flo and Vance are both clever ambitious strong-willed women fated to be deadly enemies. Flo has the advantage of being more experienced but Vance has the Jefford ruthlessness.

Compared to the movie the novel is of course much more sexually frank. Vance’s relationships with Juan and Darragh are most definitely sexual, while the movie suffers little from a lack of sexual heat in those relationships.

The changes made in the movie adaptation are relatively minor. To a large extent it was a matter of streamlining the story. Both novel and film end in the same way but the novel’s ending has some added complications which the movie screenplay dispenses with. This perhaps weakens the movie’s ending just a little but certainly not fatally. Both endings work.

Some of the changes in the movie have the effect of making the story more melodramatic, which I think is a good thing.

This is a rare case of an interesting complex novel being made into an equally interesting complex movie.

This is most definitely not a conventional western novel. This is a psychological western, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it’s a psychosexual melodrama in a western setting. The novel was written in 1948 when Freud was all the rage and there are obvious Freudian influences. The Furies is fascinating and absorbing. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Anthony Mann’s excellent movie adaptation The Furies (1950).