In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck.

In Dubious Battle is John Steinbeck’s second novel, finished in 1936. It is the story of fruit pickers in Southern California, who organize a mass strike of the seasons transitory apple pickers, with the hope that their demands for a more reasonable wage will not only be recognised by the apple growers, but also by the cotton farmers whom they will be working for after the apple season. It’s a fairly manly book, which charts the political development of its characters, and the physical and emotional struggles they face surviving in their strikers’ camp. I love John Steinbeck. The man actually managed to write two of my favourite books in the whole world – Sweet Thursday – which is just awesome, and Tortilla Flat – which contains one of my favourite scenes in all literature. The books hero, Danny, is thrown a party which is so magnificent that he gets completely, amazingly drunk, challenges all the men in the village to a fight, and then dies falling down a cliff. I cant remember the actual quote, buts its something along the lines of “Whenever people remembered and talked of that party, the stories got more fantastic and more incredible, until it was widely believed that on that night, wolves had bayed at the moon, the earth had exhaled and clouds had split and written Danny in blood across the sky”. That’s total paraphrasing though. Well beyond paraphrase in fact. Sorry Steiners. It also has a great description of Henri the Painter, which runs somewhat along these lines “Henri the painter was not French, and his name was not Henri. He was also no longer a painter, for he had so long schooled himself in the schisms of the left-bank – eagerly embracing each movement as it emerged – that before long he had given up paint entirely”. Awesome. Anyway, Stieners managed to write two of my favourite books, although these are considered by critics to be his “fun” books, and far inferior to his “not-fun” books like The Grapes of Wrath and the much less popular In Dubious Battle. Although, the majority of Steinbeck’s work deals with the same themes, in the same settings – I mean the man writes almost exclusively about conflict and struggles of working man in 1920’s Southern California. He certainly hasn’t written any books about, oh I don’t know, a mad inventor who builds a ray which accidentally shrinks down his children and next-door neighbours, not only resulting in a missed fishing trip and family bonding session, but in a near-death encounter between his anaphylactic-shock-prone son and a giant bee – so if the subject matter is mainly the same, then I guess taking out all the colour makes something a “not-fun” book, and therefore “better”. That’s not really fair though, the difference between the sets of books is that the protagonists in the “fun” books are not prepared to make sacrifices in order to improve their lives, where as in the “not-fun” books they are. I have been happily working my way through the Steinbeck’s over the years, and am generally delighted by them all. In Dubious Battle is a staggering, powerful book. It’s fairly bleak, and is basically a very, very long conversation between varieties of 40-year-old men of various vocations, but it’s still pretty darn amazing. Oh, and the title comes from Paradise Lost, courtesy of Mr Milton.

Innumerable force of Spirits armed,
That durst dislike his reign,
and, me preferring,His utmost power with adverse power opposed
In dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,
And shook His throne.