Author: Dennis E Bolen

The British Columbia Review (formerly the Orsby Review) says:

A crazy venture beneath the skies

There are, depending on who you ask, only three or six or seven or nine different types of story in the world. However long or short the list, The Journey is almost always one of them. Think The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, The Lord of the Rings, or On The Road. And there’s some part of the Canadian heart that is especially attuned to the forced narrative of travel. Maybe it’s the continent-spanning distance, the mind-bending empty space.

Victoria resident Dennis E. Bolen’s Amaranthine Chevrolet offers a fresh spin on this ancient structure. Set in 1967, a time as turbulent as our own, the book follows the story of 15-year-old Robin Wallenco, a young man of extraordinary resourcefulness and almost zero introspection, on his self-assigned quest to drive a 1942 Chevrolet pickup truck from near Kincaid, Saskatchewan, out to the west coast of Vancouver Island and the edge of the world.

The joyride starts with a fraud. Robin, a hard-working and honest lad by nature, tells a lie to get the truck registered to him, even though he’s too young to drive, and this action drives much of the narrative, as Robin does everything in his power to avoid the cops on his long road trip. The truck is, as the people Robin encounters on his journey keep reminding him, a museum piece. But it means something to him all the same.

Exactly what it means is tied up in the nature of Robin’s quest itself, and the reason this BC boy found himself working on a farm in Saskatchewan during his tender teenage years in the first place. Bolen’s prose is lean and modern, as free of bells and whistles as the cab of the three-on-the-floor war-era Chevy itself. It doesn’t take long, though, to get a glimpse of something behind the boy’s flat affect: Robin “had determined not to allow sentiments at least until the crescendo of his journey,” we are told. “Being of the practical land himself and thus resistant to metaphysical sentiment, he did not ponder hard.”

Robin doesn’t ponder hard, but this is less because he lacks the capability than because it’s easier for him not to stare into the darkness of his past. And he’s not the only one. As he drives across the endless fields of Saskatchewan, heading to Alberta where we see “a few and then many pumpjacks pecking petro-fluid from the stubbled earth,” Robin encounters a revolving cast of farmers and criminals, hippies and dropouts, enticing young women and working-class philosophers.

“You’re the envy of every decent man,” remarks one of the characters Robin meets along the way. “The thought of just picking up and driving out in your personal vehicle for parts little-known. Even for a little while it would suit one man or another at some part of his life.”

Maybe so, but it’s only as the vast plains of the prairies give way to the soaring mountains and deep forests of British Columbia that we start to get more glimpses into the real reason for Robin’s quest.

With that spare style Bolen (Anticipated Results) conjures up the vast expanse of the prairies where the story starts; but that’s not to say he isn’t incapable of ornamentation. Sometimes, the narrative contains charming bursts of lyricism—“as the heretofore comforting silence vanished inside the ardent tintinnabulation, the vibration made him strangely know that others existed on this freshening morning”—and lines like this burst out of the prairie sparseness like song birds plunging from the branches of trees. 

But the style is not just suited to the environment, but a match for Robin’s closed-off mental state too. Just like the “smoke-belch crackle-mad conflagration” of a forest fire that casts its flickering shadow over the later chapters of the novel.

It’s inevitable, in a way, that the truck becomes a character of its own, standing in as it does for another force that has shaped Robin’s young life. Like many of the men Robin meets, the truck is a veteran of World War II. And as he encounters camps of nomadic draft dodgers close to the US border, Robin can’t escape the shadow of another war going on around him.

Robin’s quest is not so much a homecoming as a search for his father. A man who, Robin is warned as he gets closer to his goal, has “got some kind of philosophy now. He doesn’t need anything.” 

It’s a philosophy that becomes increasingly tempting to Robin, too, as he nurses his ancient truck over mountains and sea passages: “it occurred to Robin that true life might not best be supported by such attachment to things. Attachment… solely meant grief.”

Bolen’s prose style is spartan at times, but he gives us more than enough to understand the inner lives of his characters. From the first moment when Robin takes the new license plates for his truck “with what he hoped were steady hands,” we understand just how much this moment means. And Robin’s conversations with the characters he encounters on his journey give us a deeper and deeper insight into the heart of this unusual young man.

“My own blend. Perfect for the road. Amaranthine tea… Tea for the ages. Ageless tea. Everlasting tea.”

So says a middle-aged woman at a hippie camp in Alberta where Robin awakes one morning about halfway through his journey. Robin’s quest to keep the old Chevy running is, in the end, as doomed as many other quest we set ourselves. And when Robin finally gets to where he’s going, he is forced to confront what we all find as we grow into adulthood: that our dreams often let us down.

It’s the quest itself that is ageless, that is everlasting. Not the tired old truck, but the road it runs on, the horizon it drives toward, grinding gears and leaking oil and leaving a trail across the burning world. Amaranthine Chevrolet builds not just to a shocking climax, but to something beyond that. When we finally get to the core of Robin Wallenco’s everlasting story, the payoff is well worth the journey.

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PressReader says:

Amaranthine Chevrolet

Dennis E. Bolen’s insightful, beautiful coming-of-age novel Amaranthine Chevrolet is a hero’s journey filled with danger and yearning.

In 1967 on a Saskatchewan farm, fifteen-year-old Robin responds to the death of his caretaker-slash-employer by taking off in his boss’s field truck on a thousand-mile trek across Western Canada. Too young to legally drive, Robin ducks the police and takes lesser-used farm roads, making his way toward his mother’s home on the coast. Along the way, he has a run-in with a drunk, shares a meal with American draft-dodgers, and falls in love. As his antique truck struggles, he receives aid from a farmer and a counselor, among others, in replacing the Chevy’s parts.

Robin’s hope and trust throb behind the pages, and they are mirrored in the poetic prose. The distant mountains are a “great granite curtain,” and Robin’s ride through the flatlands is referred to as “seemingly eternal prairie sameness.” When Robin meets John, who helps him repair a busted oil pan, John speaks about art, wishing Robin would “feel the psychic vibrations the artist meant for you over the span of time and the chasm of mortality.” Similar impartations are passed to Robin by others he meets along the road home. While the stakes may not feel high for much of his travels, Robin’s will to discover more combines with the emerging landscape and the kindness of strangers to propel the story toward the promise of better tomorrows.

Reflecting life in rural Canada in the 1960s, the wonderful historical novel Amaranthine Chevrolet shows strangers lending a helping hand to a boy on the road, who meets a world driven on by no small amount of hope.

NICK GARDNER (May / June 2025) – read on Forward Press website here.
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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The Seaboard Review of Books says:

Amaranthine Chevrolet

In Amaranthine Chevrolet, Dennis E Bolen takes the readers along for the ride while 15-year-old Robin drives from Saskatchewan across the country in a 1942 Chevy, destination: Vancouver, and home. This half-baked kid plans to traverse hundreds of kilometres and provinces using back roads and tracks, avoiding arrest over the sketchy provenance of his sweet ride and lack of a licence. 

I was reminded of trips I’ve taken across this land, voyages west by car, bus or plane. Travelling the East West corridor of our nation along either the Trans Canada Highway or railway is baked into the national psyche. People have long gone vaulting “out west” or “down East” for work as cycles of boom bust draw tree planters, miners, oil workers, farmers, film workers, oil workers and so on to brief fields of plenty. We cling to the border with the US, where the fat of the land usually lays. Bolen’s work gives us the representation of one such fraught, lateral journey across this vast land of ours. 

There’s been much talk about the idea of emptiness in Canada. The US talks about taking it over because, in one post I read, we don’t ‘use’ enough of it. Arguments have been made to cancel or back burner the Group of Seven because of claims their vistas of emptiness support colonialism. What I find interesting is that, even in 1967 when the book is set, land is spoken for. It is hard to disappear entirely. The vast wilderness of human imagination has almost entirely been cultivated. There’s always a road. There’s always a gate. Frequently it’s a gate that Robin is smart and kind enough to repair, if forced to tin snip his way through. 

“This book has a literary relative in The Odyssey. Instead of wily Odysseus seeking home after long years, it is a young boy with a hair brained quest, not much money or experience, trusting in the good of strangers and luck.”

This book has a literary relative in The Odyssey. Instead of wily Odysseus seeking home after long years, it is a young boy with a hair brained quest, not much money or experience, trusting in the good of strangers and luck. The book starts leisurely, almost bucolic and things go fairly easily for the boy who ably deals with obstacles – dodging RCMP, getting lost while threading his way. The obstacles gradually become more complex when he encounters hitchhiking hippies with a different world view than he’s hitherto been accustomed to rattle Robin’s senses. 

The narrative could have gone further when underage Robin experiences the advances of an older girl. We could have delved more into his mixed feelings of nascent desire and reluctance. Despite the law, we all know that adolescence thrusts currents of misunderstood desire on us. Inadvisable and dangerous to engage in as, say, driving a car across the country with no licence. 

Clever like Odysseus, Robin is good with mechanics, which serves him. I appreciated the granular detail of how the boy babies the machinery of his truck. It is a lost art in this day of vehicles that get diagnosed by computers. No more can one do a jury-rigged campfire weld, nor enlist a pair of pantyhose as a fan belt. 

Stakes in the book amp up via various bad actors. A particularly chilling, yet funny scene pits the boy against a drug-runner and narcissist — a narc two ways. Robin is frequently asked to meet circumstances that most couch dwelling 15-year-olds would run from. 

One of Bolens’ best features is clean, clear dialog. Presented without quotation marks, there is never a question as to who is speaking. The generally sparse dialog brought Cormack McCarthy to my mind. The searing McCarthy vibe did not extend to action, however: McCarthy plumbs horrific depths, violence that makes the heart quiver. The action in Amaranthine Chevrolet rolls out more gently and strolls quietly and purposely towards its climax. Things take a change in the last fifth when the action lays on, besetting young Robin with demands not of a boy, but of a man. The truck he drives takes Robin over and through the perilous threshold from boyhood to adulthood. Bolen brings everything together at the end of the journey with details which make the reader reconsider each action the boy has taken. 

“Life is pretty much just trying to get through without your heart turning to frozen stone.” one character tells us. Bolen compares Robin against this, without resorting to sentimentality. The long build up is payoff in the end. There is a gentleness to Robin that speaks of quiet strength and dignity. It is also, at its heart, a quest for love. Overall, the novel conjured Chrietien de Troyes for me, who wrote his romances to admonish and socially engineer the rapine and rage of young, landed men. 

I find it interesting that Bolen, author of many novels, veteran of many literary roles, was also a federal parole officer. He digs into the depths of choice, good actions, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, as well as determinants of character or criminality. He invites us to think about nature and nurture in the formation of character. I imagine that he might have thought up these words he gave another character when he was still working in Corrections: 

“It’s us adults finishing an upbringing for other adults that didn’t get a proper one in the first place…But when you talk about children who go astray it’s not just them that has to answer. It’s the parents, society, the government, the whole world. Everybody bears responsibility.” 

Sure-handed storytelling that reads simply and cleanly and carries great depth and meaning in the telling, Amaranthine Chevrolet lingers and casts a ruddy western glow on the imagination.

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