Changes

Only John Springer never really did anything ''just like that''. Sarah acknowledges he must have thought it and planned it and planned against it for quite a while before deciding. Even then it took months of planning and organising, selling off the farm, working what to take, buying wagons and stocking up before they could depart.

Peggy Elliot was initially inspired to write this tale by coming across Lillian Schissel's ''Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey'' – an inspiration that found a firm footing in her own cross-country ski-ing of routes that crossed the original trails. This is a fiction, but one firmly rooted in the facts – so far as they are known – of those pioneer forages across the great divide.

She adopts Schissel's notion that the few women who went west on the wagon trains – and they were by far the minority in those early days – undertook not the same journey as their menfolk, but a parallel one. She has one character put it into words that the men were travelling towards a hope, the women away from a home.

Then – but with fair warning – we're listening to Sarah again. Again, she's interrupted by the narrator. This reader was getting more than a bit irritated by these switching viewpoints – especially because Sarah's voice is so strong, and the narrator bland and detached by comparison.

Part of this is because using the different characters allows the author to focus on whatever aspect of trail life, past life, hoped-for future life, most touched each woman in turn thus broadening the experience we have. Some women were brave – like the young Sarah, eager to ride out on every hunt, or stride into the river to fish. Or stoic – like Rebecca – there to do and defend her heroic husband's every well-thought decision. Or skittish – like the newly married Lettie, who never wanted to come… and won't stay the trial. Or frail – like the pregnant Cora, confined to her wagon (though hers isn't the only child-in-the-making hitching a free ride to the future). There are those with book-learning and those with bush-craft. The god-fearing and the god-loving and the god-forsaking. They each have a different take.

The pleasure in the book is the detail. Notions that it takes a quorum of four for a woman to maintain her modesty whilst doing the business on an open plain – three to form the curtain, and one to do what's necessary. The idea that you can teach children all they need to know from the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare – and that Shakespeare is the greater loss when the wagon turns over. In the real relationships between the travellers and the Native Americans they encounter on the trail…the good and the bad, but very little of the ugly. Fear and distrust, often outweighed by curiosity and commerce. The recipes – for foodstuffs and for medicines.

That these things happen is the way of the trail – a fact reinforced by the other graves that they pass; that Rebecca records.

The further into the book, the more emotional it becomes – and it is hard to understand why. The writing remains simple. Understated in the extreme. And perhaps that is it. The people are real, because they are just what they are. In the real world, we meet people by watching them doing what they do, getting on with the everyday. The insights into their true souls that we have are generally few and far between – yet we come to love them. Perhaps the strength of Elliott's writing is in the telling it like it was. Hard. Cold. Bloody. Absurd. Very occasionally beautiful. Freeing. Emancipating (in that very gender-specific - and also race-specific) sense. But mostly drudgery, sharpened by pain, softened by hope.

It's rare for a book to irritate so much at its outset yet rally to completely captivate by the end. To that extent: it's a masterpiece.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

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