March 12, 2020 33
Never Before Seen in the West
Ian Frazier
Inland
by Téa Obreht.
Random House, 374 pp., $27.00
A reviewer should know better than to
give away the ending of a book, but what
about the beginning? In Téa Obreht’s
Western- themed novel, Inland, the
beginning appears to be a mono-
logue delivered from one comrade- in-
adventures to another—and in a sense,
it is. The person who is speaking and
his pal have just been in a scrape with
some riders at a fording place. “True
to form—blind though you are, and
with that shot still irretrievable in your
thigh—you made to stand and meet
them,” the speaker says. Soon we learn
that the speaker is an outlaw of Balkan
and Muslim origins (a first in Westerns,
I believe) called Lurie Mattie, a name
he acquired in Arkansas. Not until
about a quarter of the way through the
book do we know for certain that the
person Lurie is speaking to is not a per-
son but a camel. At this point, you may
find yourself thinking back and won-
dering, Do camels have thighs?
The camel’s name is Burke, which
Lurie came up with because of a cry
he often makes, “a fearsome, gargling
buuuurk.” He is a year old at the begin-
ning of their partnership, in 1856, and
almost forty at the end, when Lurie, his
faithful cameleer throughout, is still
in the saddle and still talking. (To say
more about that would give away too
much of the end, not to mention the
beginning.)
Inland combines two stories. For the
adventures of camel and rider, Obreht
evidently took a spark from the real- life
Camel Corps that served with the army
in the American Southwest before the
Civil War. The book’s other plot has
to do with a struggle between two Ari-
zona frontier towns over which will be
the county seat, and the machinations
of a ruthless cattle baron who wants
to crush the small landowners and
run them off. County- seat battles and
cattle- baron- versus- homesteader wars
are, of course, faithful perennials in
the Western genre. The cameleer’s tale
is told from his point of view, addressed
to a “you” who is always the camel. An
indefatigable lawman is pursuing Lurie
for a murder he committed in Arkan-
sas, so he is on the run through most
of the book in a picaresque flight that
covers a wide swath of the West.
The story about the county seat and
the cattle baron is told through the per-
spective of Nora Lark, a tough frontier
woman, the mother of three sons and
wife of Emmett Lark, owner- editor of
The Amar go Sentinel (Amargo is the
underdog of the two towns). Some of
her dialogue is interior, addressed to
Evelyn, her daughter who died in in-
fancy but who has remained a living
presence. Only Nora hears and sees
her; post- mortem, Evelyn has grown
into a sensible young woman who pro-
vides her mother with companionship
and wise advice. Everything Evelyn
says is in italics, and the conversations
between the two sometimes help the
plot along:
What is it, Mama?
A steer, I think. Probably one of
Absalom Carter’s.What’s it doing way out here?
Looking for water, same as us.The dead appear to Lurie, too, and
sometimes make him do things. They
are present mostly in their never- to- be-
satisfied “want,” with which he tries not
to be infected.
Near the end, the two stories inter-
sect. To reach that point without getting
tangled, Obreht employs an elaborate
and ingenious structure. The cameleer’s
story follows a chronological line, from
his arrival in America as a boy (from
Herzegovina, I suspect from clues,
though it’s not named), to his youthful
days with an outlaw gang, his meetup
with the camel detachment, his taking
off solo with Burke, etc. To demark
the sequence, we are given, as section
headings, the names of the principal
rivers of each region where the action
takes place: the Missouri, the San An-
tonio, the Colorado, the Gila and the
Salt in Arizona. These sections alter-
nate with Nora’s story, which unfolds
mostly at the family’s small sheep
ranch in 1893 during a single day, di-
vided into Morning, Midday, After-
noon, and Evening. Both stories also
use flashbacks, and sometimes flash-
backs within flashbacks.I’m a fan of all kinds of Westerns—fic-
tional and nonfictional, books, movies,
TV shows, paintings, Broadway musi-cals, whatever—so I felt encouraged
that such a powerful writer who started
from so far away would choose the genre.
Obreht was born in Yugoslavia in 1985,
left with her family when she was seven,
and arrived in the United States in 1997.
Her previous (and only other) novel,
The Tiger’s Wife, which was published
in 2011, became an international best
seller and won enormous and deserved
praise. Both novels interweave stories,
both involve geographic conflicts (the
Bosnian War; Amargo versus its rival,
Ash River), and both feature visually
dramatic animals out of place (the un-
named tiger who escapes a bombed- out
zoo, the camel).
The main story in The Tiger’s Wife
concerns Natalia, a young doctor whose
grandfather has just died while away
on a mysterious errand. The family is
never identified as Bosnian or Serbian,
but when she and another doctor go on
a humanitarian mission to bring medi-
cine to an orphanage across the border,
it’s clear they are entering what had
been enemy territory. The body of the
grandfather, who was also a doctor, has
been sent back from a village nearby,
but not his things, and Natalia makes a
detour to get them. Whether imagined
or remembered, Obreht’s details of this
off- the- main- road place register with
authority and exactness:It was a shantytown, a cluster of
plywood- and- metal shacks thathad sprung up around a single
street. Some of the shacks were win-
dowless, or propped up with make-
shift brick ovens. Household junk
spilled out of doorways and into the
yellowed grass: iron cots, stained
mattresses, a rusted tub, a vending
machine lying on its side. There
was an unattended fruit stand with
a pyramid of melons, and, a few
doors later, a middle- aged man
sleeping in a rolling chair outside
his tin- roofed house. He had his
legs up on a stack of bricks, and
as I drove past I realized his right
leg was missing, a glaring purple
stump just below the knee.As the family mourns the grand-
father, we learn about three mythical/
supernatural characters who figured
centrally in the grandfather’s life: the
tiger, the tiger’s wife, and the deathless
man. The tiger, after escaping the zoo
during World War II, hides in the moun-
tains above the grandfather’s boyhood
village and comes down occasionally,
shaking everybody up. The tiger’s wife,
a teenage bride whose human husband
brutally beats her, befriends and con-
sorts with the tiger, shaking them up
even more. And the deathless man, a
kind of non- blood- drinking, affable
Dracula, emerges from the dark every
so often to argue with the grandfather
about life and death and whether he
really is immortal. If this sounds at all
silly, it’s not—the book is truly spooky,
and as arresting and emotionally plau-
sible as the scariest fairy tales.
In some ways, Inland lacks that
book’s assurance. A reader looking for
accuracy of Western detail—probably
not the smartest approach to a novel
containing fantastical elements—will
stub a toe now and then. The cameleer-
to- be, at his story’s beginning, goes
west from an unnamed coastal city and
rides the train “all the way to where
the Missouri shallowed to mud.” This
would have been impossible in 1852,
when the journey occurs, because at
the time no tracks had been laid that
far. A huge cutthroat trout caught in
the Pecos River is described as hav-
ing “red sails... along the top of its
back”—a dream- bestiary rendering
not consistent with the actual fish. And
sometimes the dialogue goes haywire:
Nora says that her son “lost about a
stone of weight” from worrying, an un-
likely unit of measurement for a non-
English person to use in the Arizona
Territory in 1893. People say “arse”
for “ass” and “I do the washing- up” in-
stead of “I wash the dishes.” Also, they
use the word “fuck” in casual conversa-
tion. I can’t prove that isn’t how these
characters would have talked, but I
remain skeptical, even apart from the
explanations for the similarly coarse
language in the HBO series Dead-
wood as an improvement over the now
quaint-sounding profanities of the day.
Comfortable Western tropes abound.
When the marshal addresses a crowd of
townsfolk to raise a posse, are the out-
laws standing right there, unrecognized
among them? Do the outlaws applaud
his speech? Afterward, when pursued,
do they stick together, or split up to
disguise their trail? Is the town quiet
and somber after the consequent publicTéa Obreht