Camels and ghosts
Téa Obreht's "Inland" is a slow burn, but this Western with ghosts and camels really pays off.
Good morning on this Juneteenth.
I’ve just finished Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer (disappointing followup to the great Borne) and Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (clever if not quite fully cohesive reimagining of Frankenstein through the lens of AI and transsexuality). Now I’ve finally started Trust by Hernan Diaz.
You surely saw the news this past week that Cormac McCarthy has died at 89. The literary internet flooded with obits, remembrances, and listicles. But you should still go back and read my entry, focused on the Border Trilogy and The Passenger, if you missed it last month. If you’ve never read McCarthy and the news of his death has you wondering where to start, I recommend All the Pretty Horses or The Passenger.
(As a reminder, all my book links go to Bookshop.org, and if you buy a title from my affiliate link, I get a tiny fee—usually $1 - $2.)
Just two issues after writing about McCarthy’s Westerns, I’m returning to the West to recommend Téa Obreht’s Inland, which started slow for me, then picked up steam and finished with the strongest ending of any novel I can remember in a long time.
Inland alternates between two protagonists in 1893: Lurie, an outlaw traveling the frontier states falling in and out with various ragtag groups; and Nora, a mother of three in the fictional Amargo, Arizona, dealing with drought and a missing husband.
The novel starts out challenging—not due to lack of plot, but intentionally confusing. Obreht’s style is to hint and tease with veiled references you won’t fully understand until much later. I found the first Lurie section and first Nora section hard to get into.
Lurie’s story (and the book) begins with him addressing someone about an incident that happened “last night” in which his companion was shot and a girl was hurt; then he’s suddenly summarizing his life story: he emigrated to New York from Southeast Europe with his father, who was named Hadziosman Djurić, which got anglicized to Hodgeman Drury and eventually to Hodge Lurie; the father died in New York of an illness shortly after they arrived, leaving the son, Lurie, to fall in first with a grave robber, then with criminal brothers named Donovan and Hobb Mattie, together forming the “Mattie Gang,” so he becomes Lurie Mattie. All of that action “happens” in the first twenty pages, enough to make your head spin.
Nora’s situation has less going on at first blush, but more emotional toll than Lurie’s adventuring: her town of Amargo, Arizona is going through terrible drought, so she’s running out of water while also waiting for her husband (and within a few chapters, her two older sons) to return to home as she tends to her youngest son Toby (who is blind in one eye) and her niece Josie (who is a handful). As her story continues, we learn the local powers that be want to move the county seat from Amargo to the nearby Ash River, which would all but bury Amargo in the dust; her absent husband Emmett owns and operates the local newspaper, the Amargo Sentinel (journalism subplot!) and opposes moving the county seat, but was hesitant to print a rebuttal to the plan in his paper. Lurie’s sections span years, while Nora’s span just a single day.
A layer of dust covers everything in this story—everyone is parched and desperate.
I should say here that Obreht’s language is beautiful, even when just describing, say, a suspicious door left ajar on a springhouse on the farm: “The springhouse crouched in a copse of scrub oaks at the far end of the yard, but nothing was visible for all the branches, save a glimpse of light-stippled tin Nora supposed must be the roof, and a sliver of door, which jawed a little on its hinges, first this way, then that, clattering faintly where it slapped back off the jamb.”
There is a blurb of praise from The Guardian on the paperback that says, “More convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself” that I find pretty silly—Obreht’s language is more ornate than McCarthy’s severe terseness, and also more playful. (If there’s any hint of McCarthy, it’s in the way Lurie speaks.)
Inland is a true Western, but with two major twists that make this story so special: camels and ghosts.
The camels: Lurie is narrating his story to his camel, Burke, we learn deep into the novel, after he falls in with the Camel Corps., a real-life, short-lived U.S. Army experiment in the 1850s that brought camels to the West (with Arab and Turkish hired guides) to serve as pack animals for troops.
While Lurie comes into contact with a host of interesting characters in his travels—including a lawman hunting him down for an accidental murder in New York and the Syrian camel rider Hadji Ali (which gets anglicized to Hi Jolly), a real person who was one of the first cameleers hired by the Army, and who helps Lurie embrace his immigrant (and possibly Turkish) identity—his most lasting relationship is with Burke. Once he steals him from the Camel Corps, they are never parted again, and some of the best descriptions in Lurie’s chapters are tributes to the camel, even as others they encounter ridicule the animals.
The ghosts: Lurie speaks to the dead; Josie claims to be able to speak to the dead (she calls them “the other living”); and Nora hears the voice of her dead child Evelyn in her head at all times, responding to stress and critiquing Nora’s actions in the sometimes-snarky voice of a teenager, even though she died from heatstroke as a toddler.
The explanation of Nora’s embarrassment over telling her husband she hears Evelyn’s voice was fantastic. She had told him one night in bed when he came home drunk, thinking it was safe to share; much later, when Nora is annoyed by Josie holding séances in town, and doesn’t believe Josie’s claims, Emmett, defending the girl, says to her, “Don’t you talk to Evelyn?” Nora replies, wounded, “That is not the same thing.”
In Nora’s sections, we are far more inside her head than we are in Lurie’s in his tale. This one memorable exchange immediately made me understand her: one of her sons, Dolan, is in love with Josie, and tells his parents that if he ever gets to marry her, they will need to move to somewhere more comfortable than Amargo “to ensure her comfort.” Nora, offended, says, “I been living here half my life, and no one’s ever asked after my comfort.” Emmett, supporting Dolan, says to Nora, “Well, doesn’t one always hope for better where one’s children are concerned?” Then her husband and son go out into the hallway, leaving her alone in the kitchen, and she overhears Emmett say to Dolan, “Hard living is for hard people. And hard women are a particular sort to which Josie does not belong.” Nora is deeply hurt. Her interpretation: Emmett sees his own wife as a hard woman, and he doesn’t mean it as a compliment.
“Emmett hadn’t just meant one wants better for one’s children. What he had meant was: one wants better for ladies—and one wants ladies, not hard women, for one’s sons. Hadn’t he considered her a lady, once? […] Emmett had managed to bypass her wholesale. He not only failed to see her as a lady—he wouldn’t even trouble himself with the comparison. She was a tough, opinionated, rangy, sweating mule of a thing, and the sum total of her life’s work was her husband of twenty years enumerating what he desired for his sons—which did not include a companion with her qualities, but did include moving to a more favorable clime to secure the affections of a person with not one-half of Nora’s merits.”
Great character-building.
The book hits its stride 150 pages in (I know that may sound like a long time to wait) when Nora returns to the house after multiple stops in town and we start to realize she is an unreliable narrator. I don’t want to spoil anything, but multiple situations she represented a certain way are not that way, and she gets disabused of her self-deceptions in rapid fire by multiple supporting characters.
In this stretch of the novel there’s also one chapter narrated by someone other than Lurie or Nora, a villain of sorts delivering a villain monologue to Nora and Sheriff Harlan Bell, a fun structural departure. His section includes this excellent bit of theater as he explains how he obtained information with which to blackmail the sheriff: “You know who else keeps a man’s secrets? His wife. A funny thing, matrimony. Never found much solace in it personally, but I’m given to understand that it supersedes everything of consequence—pasts, friendships. Not in perpetuity, of course, which is what makes it so dangerous. For the end of such a union turns each spouse into a vault of the other’s secrets. A kind of unopened letter, if you will, waiting for the right reader.”
Nora has been trying her damnedest to keep it all together, but it crumbles in explosive fashion.
Meanwhile, you’re waiting the entire novel for Lurie and Nora, the two protagonists, to finally converge in some way, and when it doesn’t happen and the book has only a few scant pages left, just when you’re thinking it will never happen, it does, and I audibly gasped. Obreht truly obeys Chekhov’s gun rule: all the pieces she introduced in the first act go off in the final act.
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