Book: The Berrybender Narratives by Larry McMurtry

I liked this book, although it was lengthy at 910 pages. Still I persevered and got the rhythm about halfway through the book.

The Berrybenders are a wealthy British family whose patriarch, Lord Albany Berrybender, gathers up his family and retinue of servants and comes to the grand prairies of America in the 1830s. He wants to wander about, have adventures, and hunt without discrimination, and he does all of that. He is not a likable man as he is completely self-centered and rather obsessive about satisfying his various appetites. He has several children and much of this lively story concerns his daughter Tasmin, a headstrong, intelligent beauty. She finds and marries a reticent taciturn mountain man, Jim Snow, also known as Raven Brave or The Sin Killer.

 The novel begins on a Missouri River steamer which becomes locked in the ice as cold weather arrives. There is one vivid scene after another: brief encounters with Indians of various tribes, buffalo hunts, historical characters (Kit Carson, Jim Bridger), historical events (the Alamo), river travel, deaths due to disease and fighting and accidents, lusty women, slow travels by ox cart, heartbreak, the vagaries of weather, survival strategies, intrigue... The many characters became flesh and blood in my imagination as this tale progressed, and I felt drawn into their colorful, increasingly hard and often dangerous lives. Copulations happen, babies are born and the Berrybenders keep on moving through most of the four years of this novel. Whether the McMurtry is writing of sweet little boys, or mountain men, or haughty Mexican women, or young Indian braves or of Tasmin and her siblings, he entertains. One is transported to the prairies where the buffalo did roam and the Indians moved freely over endless plains, under never-ending skies. The portrayal of the Native Americans was good, not as exotics or primitives but just as fellow humans surviving in their own ways, living and dying on lands that were soon to be taken from them. I often laughed out loud while reading some passages and occasionally was sobered by the harshness of life, by the quick and unexpected deaths, by the fierceness of fighting and frontier justice.