You can't tax Larry McMurtry with an impoverished imagination. Having written 25 novels he's still able to produce this lively confection, Volume 2 of his planned four-volume Berrybender saga about a family of oddball English aristocrats loose in the American West of the 1830s.
Every manner of adventure and misadventure may be found in the hectic pages of The Wandering Hill: You've got marauding grizzlies, grisly deaths, stampeding buffalo, brawling mountain men. You've got marital discord, babies birthed, and a fork-wielding father who pokes out his son's eye at the dinner table. That last by accident. Blame the whiskey.
None of it, frankly, is very believable. The novel reads like an extended cartoon of the Wild West. Nevertheless, hard-core McMurtry fans may find high-spirited fun here, especially in the collision of wealthy, pampered Europeans with the perilous realities of the 19th century West. In those collisions, the West always wins. Members of the Berrybender party are dropping so fast it's hard to figure who'll be left standing by the end of Volume 4.
McMurtry introduced his principal players in last year's Sin Killer. Lord Albany Berrybender brings wife, half-a-dozen children, valet, tutors, cook, gunsmith, servants and various hangers-on to America for the purpose of seeing the land and shooting as much game as humanly possible. The whole unwieldy assemblage heads up the Missouri River.
Besides hunting, Lord Berrybender's interests extend to drinking and fornicating. He is an amusing study in extravagant self-absorption, although in the course of that first novel he loses his wife, seven toes, three fingers and a leg. "I find myself rather whittled down," he notes early in The Wandering Hill.
But the main character in both Sin Killer and the new novel is daughter Tasmin, "The one competent Berrybender," as she likes to say. Brash, educated, independent and spoiled, the teenage Tasmin, taking a quick dip in the Missouri, comes face-to-face with an equally naked young mountain man named Jim Snow in the opening pages of Sin Killer. By the end of the book, the two are married. Most improbably so. Think a young Katharine Hepburn tying the knot with a young Gary Cooper.
Snow, nicknamed Sin Killer for the strenuous aversion to iniquity instilled by the crackpot preacher who raised him, is a caricature of the strong, silent type. Feared and respected by whites and Indians alike, he's a man of action not words, skilled in wilderness survival. In everything else he's something of a dimwit.
And not an altogether attractive one either. Early in The Wandering Hill he smacks the pregnant Tasmin for cussing and being an unsubmissive smart-mouth. This breach in domestic tranquillity occurs as the Berrybender entourage camps at a trading post near the Yellowstone River, waiting out winter.
The novel proceeds in a highly episodic fashion, with Lord Berrybender's quest for game providing the tenuous narrative thread. Snow wanders off for a few weeks to clear his head of his troublesome Anglo wife and retrieve his more docile Indian wife, while Tasmin waits out her pregnancy in the company of Lord Berrybender's pregnant, violin-playing mistress.
McMurtry's large cast includes such historical figures as mountain men Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, the latter a bashful youth half-smitten and wholly intimidated by his friend Jim Snow's wife, who likes to tease hunky naifs like Kit. Artists George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, famous for their paintings of the West and its natives, make appearances.
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