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.
Violence erupts periodically and then fades just as quickly, creating barely a ripple in the flow of the narrative. McMurtry's brisk, mordantly comic tone gives mayhem a casual, unreal quality. When Lord Berrybender forks Bobbety instead of his intended target, a French priest, we get this: "`Egad ... 'scuse me ... what's this now?' Lord B. asked, rather unclear in his mind as to what he had just done. Bobbety emitted a single piercing shriek; before it had ceased echoing, Drum Stewart a Scottish aristocrat and fellow hunter had rushed over and covered his empty eye socket with a napkin. Tasmin herself felt the room swirl for a moment, but she didn't faint. `Be damned, what have I done?' Lord Berrybender cried. His son, one-eyed now, sat sobbing. `You've made Bobbety a cyclops, Papa,' daughter Mary said cooly -- `only his one eye is not quite in the middle of his head, as it should be in a proper cyclops.'
"`Loss of an eye is only an inconvenience -- many men have borne it," Drum Stewart said, resolving, privately, to take his meals with the mountain men from then on, their tempers being somewhat more reliable than that of the Berrybenders.'"
Later in the novel Indians kill an Irish humbug by sewing him into the body cavity of a dead buffalo, and Jim Snow drives a spear clean through the chest of a Blackfoot warrior who lives to tell the tale. But all this death and suffering seems barely felt. You half expect the dead and injured to jump up and run off stage at the end of the chapter.
Casual violence alternates with casual sex in The Wandering Hill (the title, incidentally, refers to an Indian legend about a threatening mountain that moves). There's action under the stars and in the bushes, by Indians as well as whites, and lots of talk of "copulating" and "rutting." The tie between Jim and Tasmin seems principally carnal.
Jim eventually returns to the Berrybender camp with his young Indian wife, who cheerfully takes on the role of doting nursemaid to Jim and Tasmin's newborn son Monty. Snow queasily adjusts to fatherhood. Tasmin, who came to America steeped in the heroic fantasies of James Fenimore Cooper, ponders the realities of New World romance.
"Was her husband, Jim Snow, in love with her? It hardly seemed so, although of late he had been an amiable, courteous, and fervently passionate male. Yet the fact was, love was reckoned differently on this raw frontier."
This impulse to demythologize, deromanticize, the Old West is a strong and welcome element in this novel as in much of McMurtry's work, including his masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. That said, The Wandering Hill is fairly thin gruel, entertaining perhaps, but not a book you'll be tempted to read twice.
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