A stranger with a mysterious past comes into town.  He speaks his mind and people look up to him.  He is passionate and true to himself.  He makes some enemies but does not care because he has his own personal agenda.  He makes people reflect on their lives and their values.  Yet he never really fits in.  It's a classic narrative, from Jesus to Batman to Don Draper in Mad Men.  Martha Grimes gives it a new twist, making her hero a young amnesic woman, Andi Oliver.  Andi, who is about 20 and remembers almost nothing of her past, walks into a North Dakota farming town with a mistreated donkey she has rescued.  She finds a place to stay and she immediate notices the industrial pig farm in town.  She hates any cruelty to animals, yet she needs to confront it, so she gets a job at the farm.  She is appalled by what she sees.  She is even more shocked when she demands to go to the slaughterhouse the farm pigs are taken to, and sees the terrible suffering they experience before they are killed.  She is determined to do whatever she can to fight this evil.  She searches out other people who have seen how the meat industry operates and hate its terrible treatment of animals, with the hope of bringing down the profit-driven corporation.

The great strength of Dakota is its powerful description of modern farming conditions.  It is well researched and convincing in its depiction of the treatment of livestock.  However, it is hard to know what to make of the rest of the story.  The brooding heroine, Andi, is constantly mystified how other people can tolerate the treatment of animals, and while she likes some of the people in town, she never really gets close to them.  She makes up a story about her past and tells very few people the truth about what little she knows about herself.  She has no concerns about the enemies she makes, even when they are out to get their revenge on her.  She is pursued by a mysterious man from her past who is threatening yet it isn't clear what he wants.  The one person she does get closest to is similar to her, with a terrible past he wants to leave behind, a drifter with no secure base. 

Andi is such an inscrutable and mysterious figure and the twists and turns in the plot are so bizarre that it would not have been surprising to find out that some of them were androids or visitors from the future.  The combination of the gritty realism of the animal cruelty theme with the almost super-heroic quest of Andi Oliver makes for a strange work of fiction.  We might interpret the unsettled alienation of the main characters as a reaction to the unthinking cruelty of the ordinary townspeople.  It is as if the treatment of animals throws the whole society out of kilter, making a world in which nothing makes sense, and it becomes for the oddest plot twists to occur without anyone blinking an eye. 

The unabridged audiobook is performed by Renee Raudman in a clear compassionate voice that holds conviction even when the story seems to go off the rails.

Link: Martha Grimes website.

© 2009 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Keywords: fiction, audiobook