The Grand Canyon is the greatest natural monument in the world. It is the history of geology contained in one magnificent miracle. Officially the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, it is about one mile deep, 12 miles wide on average, and, for a distance of 279 miles, it winds across the desert plateaus of northern Arizona. Europeans first explored it in 1540 when a Spanish expedition force arrived at the South Rim.
But it was not until much later, in 1869, that the full extent of this awesome wilderness phenomenon was realised. The Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell led a small group down the Colorado River and through the canyon. It took three months and made him a national hero. Such is the dramatic appeal of the place, it expresses as nothing else the sublime romance and danger of the US landscape.
Parts of the canyon were designated a national park in 1919, but this also left certain loopholes for the contentious construction of hydro power dams.
Debate raged as late as 1968 when Congress prohibited the damming of the canyon. Nowadays, it is a tourism magnet, more than five million people visit the canyon rims each year. Most of them are corralled into safe viewing areas, but the element of adventure endures.
The popularity of the canyon was still well in the future when the newly married Glen and Bessie Hyde decided in November 1928 to run the hazardous canyon rapids in a homemade scow. It was supreme adventure and extremely dangerous. But it was also a calculated, rather opportunistic plan. It was not about romance.
They wanted to follow the Green River south until it became the Colorado, then run that west through the Grand Canyon and out on to the flats of southern California. The goal was to set a record: Bessie would be the first woman to run the rapids.
That combined with the fact that it was their honeymoon, would, they felt, give them a great story and the chance of a national lecture tour. Lisa Michaels's impressive first novel is based on that true story. Yet, unlike many many writers of "factions", she has had to create a thrilling, believable narrative out of very few facts. Grand Ambition is far more than mere historical reconstruction, it is quite a feat of storytelling.
The Hydes never returned. All that remains are a couple of photographs and a scrappy journal. Glen's father, a widower farmer, worried by the silence that developed within two weeks of them setting off, travelled to the canyon to find them. He tells part of the story and his voice is sad and resigned.
Most of the narrative takes the form of third person sequences split between the journey as it unfolded and flashbacks, not only to the early days of their romance, but to the strange young life Bessie had already lived prior to meeting Glen.
Such is the Grand Canyon's appeal, any story connected with it is bound to be compelling. Few first novels could draw a reader to it as effectively as Grand Ambition. There are other factors as well; Michaels knows the canyon and has made several trips there, including two winter journeys. She once worked there as a volunteer on a US geological survey study. All of this adds to the physical sense of the place evoked through the book. It is true that she concentrates on the mighty Colorado and the terrifying rapids that couple tried to conquer, yet the brooding canyon is a presence.
The prose is impressively restrained - far less gushy than in the author's brief autobiographical note. Michaels works hard at the characterisation, particularly of Bessie, who emerges as an unusual, restless individual, the possessor of a past that she somehow fell into.
Neither of the Hydes is a hero. Glen's personality is developed more through his father's memories of him than through Bessie's observations. Michaels cleverly makes clear that the couple don't really know each other that well and yet are confronting a life-or-death situation they willingly walked right into.
Also evocative is the US she presents; a country still aglow with the triumph of Lindbergh's Atlantic crossing the previous year, a country yet to be hit by the Wall Street Crash, then some eleven months in the future. Far more than an adventure that backfired, this is an exciting, almost cautionary, well-told tale about a dangerous hunger for escape and self fulfilment.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
