McMurtry's earlier Western novels including "Lonesome Dove" are rich, dense and full. This book is rich and complex, but it is short and leaves a lot of loose ends. It doesn't stand on its own. It is more like the first instalment of a single big novel although it is marketed as the first novel in the "Berrybender Narrative," a tetrology that was completed in 2004. McMurtry's agent and his publisher must have thought they were really smart to find a way to get people to buy one novel for the price of four.
"Sin Killer" is set in 1832 and has a cracked English lord, Albany Berrybender, taking his family up the Missouri by riverboat as he travels the path of Lewis and Clark and hunts on the wild frontier. In their travels, they run across historical trappers, traders, scouts and Indian chiefs. (I am not sure of how to refer to the historical First Nations. In Canada, we don't tend to say Indian in the media any more but McMurtry' characters speak within older linguistic conventions). The main plot has the eldest Berrybender daughter, Tasmin, falling in love with Jim Snow, trapper, guide, preacher, Indian fighter, marrying him and then leaving him in a rage when she realizes he has two or three Indian wives too.
McMurtry's tells the story with the same kind of deadpan surrealism that he brought to his other Western novels like "Buffalo Girls" and "Lonesome Dove." Berrybender is a bloodthirsty, horny fool who manages to shot off or freeze several fingers and toes in his misadventures. His alcoholic wife manages to die an accident leaving him to console himself with a few mistresses. He also seems to be remarkably content to be who he is, and to be, as we moderns say, "in the moment". Various members of the family and the party run off or are taken captive by various groups of Indians. By introducting British characters and their European aides and servants alongside American frontiersman into a land occupied by Indians, he seems to deliver his own comical commentary on the great themes of early American literature - civilization and savagery, the American as the pure new man of the New World, innocents abroad, etc.
It's a mature work by a major writer. It's smart, it has a good story. But it's still only a piece of real novel.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
Actually, the fourth book in the series, Folly and Glory, came out a few months ago. I reviewed it here.
2 - Justene
This review was chosen for Advance.net. You will be able to find it on newspaper sites including Cleveland.com.