Thirsty for more detail
Téa Obreht’s second novel brilliantly captures the hardscrabble lives of the pioneers of America’s West, but its dual timelines prevent it from building much narrative momentum. By Larry Ryan
This book unfurls slowly – sometimes very slowly – over the arid, unforgiving land of new American frontiers. It spans several decades and a single day, in two narratives that only faintly, yet fatefully, converge. They are united in tales of a desperate scrabble to make a life and sustain it in the West: in some senses a familiar story, but with fresh trails to travel down
Inland is the Serbian-american author Téa Obreht’s second novel, coming eight years after her debut, The Tiger’s Wife, won the Orange Prize when she was just 25. That book mythologised the history of her Balkan birthplace and spanned much of the 20th century. Now, she turns to her adopted homeland and the fables of the 19th century.
The new work is a story of travelling and waiting, loss and ghosts, of wants and survival and thirst. Extreme thirst.
Nora Lark is marooned at her home in the barely-there township of Amarago in the Arizona territory. It is 1893 and the area, and her
husband’s newspaper endeavour, are under threat of being eclipsed by the growing new town of Ash River and an unscrupulous local businessman. Emmet, said husband, has been gone for several days, trekking in search of precious water, but his return isn’t guaranteed and no word of him has made it back home.
Has he been killed or has he skipped off in search of adventures further west? Nora’s two eldest boys have left to find him and may also have run into trouble. She is beset by fear, left behind with her immobile motherin-law, her youngest son and a flighty niece, the latter pair’s heads filled with visions of beasts and much else roaming the terrain.
Nora, who lost another daughter, Evelyn, to sunstroke as an infant, heads off seeking water, her husband and her sons, but to no avail. While the men of her family may be missing in action, others visit the house: a doctor, an operator with his eyes on the newspaper prize, and the town sheriff with whom Nora has a longheld, complicated and unresolved connection.
Lurie Mattie drives a second narrative line, told over several decades and interspersed with Nora’s single-day story. He’s a child migrant from the Levant, travelling for a new life in the new world with his father who swiftly dies. In America as a young orphan he turns to the peripatetic life, assisting a grave robber and then becoming a member of vicious gang.
A brutal murder sends him fleeing a bounty and, eventually, he collides with an unlikely source of solace: a camel from a herd shipped to the US in the 1850s for use by the army. Lurie encounters them as they are being trekked south to the American army general who ordered them and manages to get himself included in their caravan.
And so a life on the run slows to one of roaming on an otherworldly beast, searching for something that can’t quite be found. The Mattie sections are presented as a sort of internal monologue, elegiacally and movingly addressed to Burke, his animal travelling companion.
The image and idea of the camels is one of the most arresting in the book. The book is suffused, too, with a hint of magic realism. It is a time of spirituality and a belief in the occult, and Obreht plays with this neatly, but occasionally the pacing jars. There are longueurs in the middle section, perhaps to emphasise Nora’s plight, but it struggles to carry you through.
Only in the final third does greater narrative drive emerge, delivering more emotional heft and a deepening of the characters.
I desperately wanted to like this novel. It is full of beautiful sentences and fascinating period details, but something is lacking: it’s not quite a character study, just short of a gripping yarn and it doesn’t open out to an expanse of new ideas. It gives tantalising hints at all three, but somehow I was left feeling parched. n
The new work is a story of travelling and waiting, loss and ghosts, of wants and survival and thirst. Extreme thirst