Novel set in Trinidad, Colorado (the period and setting beautifully evoked)
- Book: Honeyville
- Location: Trinidad, CO
- Author: Daisy Waugh
This is a clever way of dreaming up the plot for a novel. Choose a fairly obscure historical event and switch the spotlight from the men at the centre of the action (it’s almost always men, isn’t it?) to the women on the periphery, at the same time drawing out the parallels between both. Daisy Waugh has chosen to focus on the 1914 miners’ strike in Colorado which culminated in the Ludlow Massacre, when the National Guard and personnel from the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company attacked a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families. What seems to have really fuelled Waugh’s ire and prompted the writing of this novel was the discovery of a newspaper article from the time, in which the writer, making a typically snap judgement on events, chooses to denounce the wives of Trinidad’s elite for their attitude to the miners. Waugh could, with some justification, have written directly about the miners and their plight, but she chooses instead to focus on the lives of two women, both connected in different ways to the events.
The narrator is Dora Whitworth, a prostitute from one of the more exclusive brothels in town, who has encountered both union leaders and management in her working role and watches the events unfold from a distance. At the time, Trinidad, Colorado was the only place in the West where prostitution was legal and, as a result, a thriving red-light district has grown up, much to the disgust of the nice ladies of the town. It is from the ranks of this elite that the second main character emerges. Inez has been raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle and spends her days doing voluntary work at the local library and drinking tea with the other affluent ladies. In normal circumstances these two women would never have encountered each other, much less become friends but fate throws them together when they are trapped in a drugstore, while a brutal murder is committed outside. Inez faints (well, she would, wouldn’t she?) and Dora takes command of the situation, dragging her off to a local bar for some bourbon.
From that point on, the story fairly rattles along and it’s not one you’re going to find easy to put down. Dora is very engaging as a narrator and, as the story unfolds, you find yourself desperately hoping that things will work out for her. Inez is harder to sympathise with – there’s a bit too much of the spoilt-little-rich-kid-playing-revolutionary about her for me to like – but where I think this novel really comes into its own is in the way that Waugh cleverly draws the parallel between the miners and the prostitutes. Both groups are cruelly exploited, cheated of their earnings, even treated as less than human, but only one of the two groups normally make the spotlight and I congratulate the author for addressing this oversight.
Waugh, in this novel, also brings the settings to life in such a vivid way that you can almost smell the disinfectant which pervades the air in the brothel. She clearly knows her stuff and has done her research. She tells us, in Acknowledgements that much of the town of 1914 Trinidad is still standing, just boarded up and ignored, as if America just wanted to turn its back on the shameful past and forget about it. Now, if anything would tempt the visitor to go and have a look, surely that is it …
This review first appeared on our blog where we chat to the author about the book, writing and reading Tarot.
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