I have been slowly working my way through Larry McMurtry’s oeuvre. The Berrybender Narratives brings together the four volumes of the epic story of the American West: Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill, Sorrow’s River, and Folly and Glory. In these books, he sets the fictional English aristocratic family, the Berrybenders, against the American frontier of the early 19th century, beginning in the year of Our Lord 1803. Lord Albany Berrybender comes to America to do some big game hunting (bison and grizzlies). He brings with him his wife, five of his fourteen children, a staghound, a parrot, a tutor for the children, a valet/gun bearer, a gunsmith, a carriage maker (along with a wagon, carriage, and horses), a stable boy, a cellist, a ladies’ maid, a kitchen maid, a cook, and a laundress and hires a steamship to move his family up the Missouri.
The family is certainly idiosyncratic with their excesses standing in sharp contrast to the harshness of American life along the great river. That said, they all live and breathe as fully developed characters. McMurtry writes women particularly well, and Tasmin, Lord Berrybender’s oldest daughter, is no exception. Like Lorena in Lonesome Dove and Nellie Courtnight in Telegraph Days, Tasmin is a gritty, self-determining character who holds her own with—and often against—the men in the books. The Berrybenders interact with almost every well-known explorer from the early days of America’s western expansion, including Toissant Charbonneau (of Sacagawea fame) and his son Pomp; mountain men Jim Bridger and Kit Carson; plus countless Native Americans and Mexicans. Lord Berrybender’s folly leads to the demise of much of his family and worsening of his own health. Tasmin, now married to the fictional Jim Snow, a tough frontiersman and ferocious Indian fighter, rises to the occasion and dictates the family’s course, moving them into Texas to intersect with Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.
These books are spiked with adventures, shoot-outs, battles, disease, and other dangers along with fascinating characters (real and fictional) who display humor and endure love and loss. Another McMurtry tour-de-force.
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The Berrybender Narratives (Simon & Schuster, May 29, 2010) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my reviews of other McMurtry books here:
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