Jan-Maat's Reviews > Inland

I remembered from when her first book came out, photographs of her showing an astonishing high forehead, but in more recent pictures her forehead looks quite unremarkable. Perhaps it is simply remarkable what difference a hairstyle can make.

Anyway, I guess I was attracted by the colours on the cover of this book, I scanned the back, sniffilly dismissed the praise, I saw it was a western. I put it down and wandered on. But the thought gnawed at me - why would she write a western? OK, why not you might say, but why does a writer chose to set a story in the past, and in a particular location? You will have guessed by now that Obreht had subtly caught me and that I soon found myself sitting in the sun reading the first few pages of this book wondering where it was going and how or even if the different elements might be brought together.

An answer to my question rose up out of the cloudy, gloomy depths of my memory. As I was writing in my review of Helden in Harnas; Gedrukte ridderverhalen uit de vijftiende en zestiende eeuw, the western is a realm of fantasy (view spoiler)[ both I think in reality and in Art (hide spoiler)], a translation in to more modern times of the knightly Arthurian Romance of the middle ages. It is a space of reinvention, there is the potential of transformation, the clash of ideologies and ways of life, but also and probably importantly just as with Camelot and with special thanks to Frederick Jackson Turner's essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History we know this fantasy realm is time limited. But before we crash in to 1890 there is space for multiple American dreams, for huddled teaming masses to escape from Europe and forget their native languages and try out new names or faiths, for a drifting aspiring teacher to become an indebted newspaper proprietor, for a no good, low down scheming Englishman (view spoiler)[ but is there any other kind I ask myself (hide spoiler)] to become a sinister cattle magnate, a place of fantasy where you can seek to exterminate all the prior inhabitants or seek to live with them, a place of adventure where you will be cheated and fooled, and worst of all when you have your gun in your hand and you look at your target you are pretty certain that the one chance you have to end the bad business you find yourself in just isn't good enough and that you will lose the ensuing shoot-out.

The story has two narrators, one a seemingly (view spoiler)[oops, spoiler alert (hide spoiler)]tough as nails wife and mother, her narration takes places over a day and the following morning. It is rather like a western version of the book of Job - losses and receiving visitors in between scratching at her sores. The other is a man who addresses us directly, but it later turns out that he is talking to his camel, so as readers we spend a chunk of the book as a camel, which is very useful for traversing the arid landscape of Arizona before statehood, only occasionally pausing to drink incredible amounts of water while carrying the plot forward. The camel romance spans maybe half a century. These two stories intertwine. Both narrators carry or create their ghosts (view spoiler)[ depending on your attitudes and opinions as to what might or might not occur after life (hide spoiler)]. The people and the places they left behind them, the identities they had, or might have preferred to have, the people they have lost.

Complete magical realism breaks out in a glorious two page passage at the close of the book. It is a fun book, if it will be much read in sixty years time I could not say, but now it is fun.