Far Bright Star in Around the World in 80 Books

Aug 21, 2009 Steve rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction, westerns

If, years from now, there were a recognized school of Cormac McCarthy influenced writers, there is little doubt – to my mind at least --that Robert Olmstead would be pointed out as the leading practitioner. Olmstead knows the drill – guns, extreme violence, campfire philosophy, gorgeous (and stark) landscapes, realistic dialogue, all of which are captured in a dark poetry of language that seems to jump the whole deal into a kind of an American myth. A perfect example is Olmstead’s earlier Civil If, years from now, there were a recognized school of Cormac McCarthy influenced writers, there is little doubt – to my mind at least --that Robert Olmstead would be pointed out as the leading practitioner. Olmstead knows the drill – guns, extreme violence, campfire philosophy, gorgeous (and stark) landscapes, realistic dialogue, all of which are captured in a dark poetry of language that seems to jump the whole deal into a kind of an American myth. A perfect example is Olmstead’s earlier Civil War novel, Coal Black Horse, which I’m starting to believe will be viewed on a level with McCarthy’s great novels.

Far Bright Star, while good, is something less. Normally I favor brevity over length when it comes to novels, but in this case, I think Far Bright Star could of benefitted from an extra 50 to 100 pages. The novel opens in a wobbly way, as the reader is dropped into the middle of a patrol (largely comprised of fools) pursuing Pancho Villa, led by an aging horse soldier, Napoleon Childs. Relationships and back stories are hinted at, which is fine, since such things can come out later. The problem is, in a 200 page novel, you’re kind of cramped for space. Anyway, Childs leads this patrol into a trap that he senses early on, but can’t quite put his finger on. This is one of the best parts of the novel, as the patrol knows they’re being followed, but evidence is scarce. When they are seen, in a beautifully executed passage, Napoleon knows it’s already too late.

He lifted the field glasses, and scanned the vast emptiness of the broken country. But he didn’t need to. The Rattler horse was vibrating with the news of their surroundings and who occupied them. Then he saw them. The distant riders had multiplied and placed themselves between him and the direction he intended. He caught sight of them as if miniature points on a compass of their world. They knotted the landscape in twos and threes. They were to the north and to the east and to the west and to the south a speck of a man holding a rifle stood over a thin trail they’d just descended and then a second man stepped from the rocks and stood beside him. They appeared and disappeared in the shimmering glaze of heat, as if ink drawn and washed away and drawn again. (p. 46-47)

That bit got my attention. What follows is a battle – a rather fantastic battle in a storm that seems more like Gettysburg than a fight between a few dozen men, and after that an ordeal to survive that involves beatings and torture and a long brutal walk in the sun. The meaning of life – and death, crosses Napoleon’s mind more than once, and the reader is treated to numerous musings which can be both profound and corny in the space of a single paragraph. That’s hardly a crime, and probably in keeping with most philosophical systems, but in a short novel it does tend to lard things up a bit. (Tolstoy sensed this, which is why he packaged his baloney in a thousand page book.) As the novel inched toward its closing, I was actually getting irritated with this stuff, but the closing, which was beautiful and profound, to some extent won me over. But I’m not sure the novel as a whole earned that moment. Lots of 5 star writing, but overall a book where the parts are greater than the whole.

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