Message to Annie Proulx.
In your afterword to The Power Of The Dog you state that Savage's title comes from the Book Of Common Prayer. It doesn't. The Book Of Common Prayer may be a waymark in the trajectory of this particular phrase, but the phrase itself comes from Psalm 22, verse 20 ... more

Message to Annie Proulx.

In your afterword to The Power Of The Dog you state that Savage's title comes from the Book Of Common Prayer. It doesn't. The Book Of Common Prayer may be a waymark in the trajectory of this particular phrase, but the phrase itself comes from Psalm 22, verse 20 of what Christians call The Old Testament, as though, in renaming the source, they might conceal it.

The appropriation by Christians of a Hebrew, Jewish, text, is an example of cultural misappropriation which we must confront if we seek to be honest, just as we must confront the presence of Edward Nappo, the true, Indian, landowner, and his son, of the landscape, in the text. Equally we cannot overlook Phil's anti-Semitism concerning the Jewish hide dealer.

In The Power Of The Dog we have what is ostensibly a story about relationships set in Montana, but they serve, if only inadvertently, to reveal older truths at deeper levels which we must disinter in due course.