I enjoyed Ivan Doig’s "The Whistling Season" so much I don’t know where to start. The setting is twice removed from today. It is 1957, the year of Sputnik. The state of Montana has charged Paul Milliron, Superintendent of Public Instruction, with closing all the one-room schools in the state. Because of the Russian space success the state is shifting educational emphasis to science and larger school districts, looking for efficiency and rigorous instruction. Milliron is saddened by the task before him and the demise of the small, rural school. (Does any of this sound at all familiar.) While preparing to announce the schools’ closing, Paul laments, "What is being asked, no, demanded of me, is not only the forced extinction of the little schools. It will also slowly kill those rural neighborhoods…." As Paul deals with this crisis, he remembers a season of his one-room school in 1909, the year he turned 13. His memories form the heart of the novel.

"Can’t Cook But Doesn’t Bite…Housekeeping position sought by widow. Sound morals, exceptional disposition." For homesteader Oliver Milliron, a widower trying to raise three sons by himself, the housekeeping and cooking chores had reached a crisis point when he spotted this ad in a newspaper. Paul admits, "We practiced downkeep." Surely, the "Can’t Cook" was a jest. Anyone who can keep house, can cook, can’t they? Out of desperation and sight unseen, Oliver takes a chance and sends an salary advance to the lady in question. Expecting a frowzy older woman with a big bosom, what the Millirons receive instead is a pretty, kind, industrious woman who Paul says turned the mood of the place around by just showing up. However, she also brings along a surprise, her brother, the scholarly Morrie, who has some unusual talents. Along with Latin declensions he knows how to use brass knuckles. Rose and Morrie arrive in Montana with almost no possessions, vague rumors of a lost fortune and a troubled past. Morrie tells the Millirons that he too has traveled to Montana for work. When Oliver asks what he is good at, he replies, "Whist. Identification of birds. A passable reciting voice, I’m told. Latin declensions. A bit rusty on Greek." Fortuitously the school’s teacher elopes with a traveling evangelist, and Morrie is recruited to fill her place. Although he is a novice at teaching, he brings enthusiasm and excitement to the classroom. Paul describes his instructional explanations as soaring "off into full trapeze flight", and he captivates the children, even the held-over eighth grade thugs with "a rim of fuzz on the upper lip".

Morrie and the Marias Coulee School are at the heart of this novel, but language and character drive it. During one memorable descriptive section, Paul stands in the school-yard late one afternoon, late in the season and notices, "The pewter cast of light that comes ahead of winter…." He saw, "…the trails in the grass that radiated in as many directions as there were homesteads with children, all converging to the school-yard spot…," and realized, "the central power of that country school in all our lives." Paul knows he will never forget that moment nor what it taught him. Doig’s writing brings to mind Willa Cather’s works and the impact of the prairie on the lives of those who inhabit her novels.

What a glorious book, and what glorious writing! The novel ends with some surprises and unexpected twists of plot, but for me the enduring grace of "The Whistling Season" is Doig’s lyrical ode to a disappearing lifestyle and the centrality of the rural school to that style of life. I highly recommend "The Whistling Season" by Ivan Doig. It is a book too good to miss. The library has other books by Ivan Doig. He writes lovingly of a bygone era that somehow doesn’t seem so long ago.

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