Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 17 Jan 2020

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

The real identity of the author who wrote under the pen name of B. Traven is one of literature’s great mysteries. A simple search on the internet will give you all the information you need about this and it will certainly save me rehearsing the (sometimes crackpot) multitude of bizarre theories about who he was and where he came from. A wider reading of his books provides probably the best information we have on this author: we can be pretty sure that this was someone who had a detailed and intimate knowledge of Mexico and the struggles of the Mexican working class and it’s probably a fair assumption that he had Socialist sympathies. Beyond that, it’s speculation and the books have to talk for themselves.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is almost certainly Traven’s best known book – which may be the consequence of a successful and well-known John Huston directed movie. I’m glad it’s quite a long time since I saw the film because I wasn’t so tempted to compare it to the book and I was able to read it without too much influence from that direction.

The story itself isn’t a complex one:  two itinerant oilfield workers who are temporarily out of work – Dobbs and Curtin – opportunistically decide to swap their professions in order to become gold prospectors in the Sierra Madre mountains. They recruit an old hand, Howard, to help and as a result they discover that without him they would be completely at sea. They secretly stake a claim and develop an open-cast mine which, after a lengthy spell of back-breaking work, starts to yield-up results. They then have to defend the mine from others, especially a group of bandits and a freelance prospector, in the hope of getting their bags of gold-laden dirt back to Durango.

Of course it’s not this relatively simple plot that is the point of the book but the interaction between the three main characters and the way they respond to the lust for gold that takes hold of them. Whilst the book is often described as an exercise in social realism, I think this misses the point. It most certainly isn’t a book about gold prospecting in Mexico at a particular historical moment (immediately post First World War) but rather it’s a journey into the psychology of early twentieth century capitalism. Individualism, greed and deceit are punished as community, loyalty and respect for native cultures emerge as the only ways to survive an otherwise amoral and brutal world.

The great strength of Traven’s book in my view is the simple clarity of his style – unadorned and direct. The seeming simplicity of the storytelling is deceptively difficult to do well but he is able to not only pull you into the story in quite an intimate way but he also delivers his political and moral messages without making them overly clumsy insertions into the plot.

The structure he’s chosen to use is also interesting because although this is a 300+ page book, the story feels that it really belongs in a novella. But he bolts onto the central story a couple of stories-within-the-story which play the role of moral fables that the protagonists tell each other and which both foreshadow events and fill in background depth and dimension. This means that although we never actually leave the company of a very small cast of characters, the range and scope of the book is expanded by this quite simple expedient.

Ultimately this is a world in which selfishness and greed get their just rewards and decency and humanity come off better – but only if the quest for material wealth is abandoned as an illusion that can be blown away by the wind.

Paperback and hardback editions are not easy to find in mainstream bookshops but you’ll pick one up for a moderate price on the internet. The extra effort it takes to track a copy down is well worth the effort.

 

Terry Potter

January 2020