Book Reviews by Ross Thrasher
Cautionary tales about the oil industry and its impact on modern society have a 100-year lineage. Here are brief summaries of a historical petro-fiction classic and an impressive recent entry in the genre.
Oil!, by Upton Sinclair. Penguin, 2023.
This epic novel by the muckraking author of The Jungle and King Coal was originally serialized in The Daily Worker, and then published in book form in 1927. Oil! is now available in a Penguin Classics edition, with an excellent introduction by Michael Tondre. The story is set during the California oil boom of the early 1900s, superimposing a young man’s journey on the actual events of that era.
By the way, the Oscar-winning movie There Will Be Blood is loosely based on this novel.
As a young teen, “Bunny” Ross gets a practical education from his father, a successful oil executive, in land acquisition, drilling practices, political influence and the other tricks of the petroleum trade. In the course of this narrative Sinclair lampoons the social climbers who are victimized by oil speculators, and the religious fervour of uneducated farmers in thrall to an evangelist (a male equivalent of Aimee Semple McPherson).
Growing into manhood, Bunny earns more responsibility in Dad’s expanding enterprises, despite some misgivings about the lies and bribes that fuel the business.
When the oilfield workers go on strike for better wages and hours, the idealistic son tries unsuccessfully to persuade Dad to meet their demands.
The coming-of-age story continues with Bunny’s enrolment in university, where through personal contacts overseas and the views of a contrarian professor, he gains some insight into global geopolitics. He participates in campus activism extolling the “workers’ paradise” that is under development in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, but the prevailing American fear of the “red menace” attracts powerful forces to compel his retreat.
Bunny’s ensuing struggle to reconcile the demands of labour and capital occupies the rest of this novel. Oil! is not so much about oil per se as it is about how the individualistic quest for wealth and influence leads to hypocrisy and corruption. In a rapidly industrializing America, petroleum greases the path to power.
The Black Eden, by Richard T. Kelly. Faber, 2023.
The Black Eden is a nuanced exposition of the stresses that a potential petroleum windfall imposes on personal relationships, communities, even countries. The search for oil at the bottom of the North Sea in the 1960s propels this engaging novel, interweaving the stories of three pairs of young men in Scotland over two decades.
Aaron and Robbie are small-town boys, sons of a teacher and a farmer respectively. Aaron earns a PhD in geology and gets involved in deep-sea oil exploration, while Robbie, less educated, works for a while as a roughneck on the same offshore rig as his boyhood friend. They both experience precarious employment, and physical peril, in this emerging sector.
Mark and Ally begin as private-school pals in Edinburgh, then pursue professional careers, Mark as a journalist and later a politician, and Ally as a lawyer and later an investment banker. Their friendship shatters over ethical disagreements about Scotland’s entitlement in the black-gold bonanza.
The third strand in the plot features a family-run fishing business in the north of Scotland. One of the sons, Joe, and his sister’s husband Ray are scheming to transform the company into a service arm of the emerging North Sea oil industry, against the wishes of their tradition-minded patriarch.
Wrangling oil from beneath the seabed is a high-tech, expensive enterprise, and the work of extraction is difficult, dirty and dangerous. The Black Eden documents those challenges in colourful detail, embedding an undercurrent of class analysis by contrasting the vernacular dialogue of the roughnecks and fishermen with the eloquence of the politicians and plutocrats. It’s a subtle, well-written novel that prompts deep reflection on the dilemmas of fossil-fuel development.
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