by Téa Obreht
It’s 1893 and the sparsely populated settlement of Amargo, deep in the Arizona Territory, is experiencing a severe drought. With the town’s water supply fast depleting, headstrong frontierswoman Nora Lark finds herself withstanding a further bombardment of pressing concerns. Her husband Emmet, editor of The Sentinel newspaper, has gone missing during a water-run, and anxious that their father has been ambushed and left for dead, eldest sons Rob and Dolan have set off in his pursuit. None have left word of their whereabouts. Nora eagerly awaits the return of the Lark men while also trying to quell the fears of her guileless, spirit-communing ward Josie and youngest boy Toby, who are convinced there’s a dark beast prowling the land at night.
Nora’s narrative subtly intertwines with that of Lurie, an orphaned outlaw wanted for murder who falls in with the Camel Corps (see Beyond the Book). As this unruly band of migrant cameleers makes its way across the treacherous West, Lurie is haunted by the ghosts from his lawless boyhood and forms a touching kinship with the unlikeliest of companions.
In truth, attempting to encapsulate Inland’s many sprawling story-tendrils within a neat synopsis is to do this bewitching novel a great disservice. We may only follow two central protagonists, but from the get-go Obreht gives voice to a legion of lives and spirits that put flesh on the bones of a majestic, untamed American West unburdened by stale cowboy-and-Indian tropes. Sure, this is a sun-baked, hardpan land of sheriffs, natives and outlaws; but Obreht’s West equally belongs to Muslims and heathens, ghosts and water-witches, carnies and camels, and more besides.
The denizens of this West (both living and deceased) are granted coherently complex personalities. Even bit-part players, such as steadfast Sheriff Harlan Bell and altruistic Doc Almenara, are spared any cookie-cutter two-dimensionality. Within pages, sometimes paragraphs, of being introduced, they bloom into fully-realized beings who struggle to walk the line between their principles and the harsh realities of life on the frontier. But to hint at more would perhaps spoil the novel’s magic.
Nora in particular is an irresistible Rubik’s Cube of a woman. She pours scorn on teenage Josie’s claims to spiritualism while she herself converses with her deceased infant daughter Evelyn, who over the years has continued to grow into a young woman in her mother’s mind. Every time you think you have a handle on Nora, she lets slip another nugget of a secret that forces you to reconfigure her in a new light. But for all her shortcomings, you can’t help but side with this lone woman as she fights for Amargo amid an ongoing newspaper debate for residents to abandon their drought-ridden settlement for the better resources of nearby Ash River County.
Episode after suspenseful episode fizzes with life thanks to shimmering prose and rippling turns of phrase. Obreht has an uncanny ability to conjure up singular imagery with the panache of an illusionist—”screams lit up like candles around us”—and even the most everyday of goings-on she can render ethereal—”She nudged the door with her foot, and a triangle of sun yawned across the springhouse floor.”
By the end, Inland’s miscellany of slow-burn mysteries—how Nora and Lurie’s lives connect, the fate of Emmett and sons, the unidentified dark beast, the future of Amargo—begin to unravel in wholly unexpected ways, delivering a tour de force climax that will haunt you for days.
Book reviewed by Dean Muscat
