Shane is a simplistic, highly romanticized treatment of the basic Western formula--a mysterious stranger with a gun arrives to help innocent homesteaders who are being threatened. In this case, the villain is the "big rancher" who hires a gunman to drive out the small land owners so that he can expand his cattle operation. The narrator of the story, the young son of a homesteader, describes Shane this way:
"He was tall and terrible there in the road, looming up gigantic in the mystic half-light. He was the man I saw that first day, a stranger, dark and forbidding, forging his lone way out of the unknown past in the utter loneliness of his own immovable and instinctive defiance. He was the symbol of all the dim, formless imaginings of danger and terror in the untested realm of human potentialities beyond my understanding."
Wow. Just wow. Who wouldn't run the other way?
Yet this same Shane has a softer side, inspiring hero worship in the young boy, a bromance with the father homesteader, and romantic love in the wife. Self sacrificing to the end, Shane rides away after defeating the enemies, resuming his lonely travels. As he leaves, the family wonders, "Who was that masked man?" NO, WAIT. That's the mysterious hero from another story. In this story, the wife says, "He's not gone. He's here, in this place, in this place he gave us. He's all around us and in us, and he always will be." (Cue the dramatic music and bring on the hankies.)
I am poking fun, but this novel is not as ridiculous as I make it sound. It has such a straightforward good-versus-evil format and such earnestness and high drama that it becomes affecting. It's a pity I did not read it when I was in junior high. I would have loved it then, I know. I am a bit too cynical these days, I guess.
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