Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Western Classic, October 24, 2001
This is yet another in the long line of great tales about the American west. Like the best of them, it is historically accurate, richly detailed, and intensely readable. The tale begins, as so many of them do, with a violent encounter between the savage Comanche Indians and an outnumbered plains family in West Texas. The entire family is killed, except for the youngest daughter, who is kidnapped. The plot has to do with the two men who decide they are going to get her back. One, the brother of the murdered man, is motivated by a white-hot hatred for these Comanches, and the other, the family's 17 year-old stepchild, is motivated by his love for his ten-year old captured sister. It is a journey which takes them them through the trackless wastes of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, and lasts for six years. Like so many great novels, the beauty of this one is in the small things. Mart, for example, the stepchild, continues his relentless search because of a memory he has of the child. On the day she was lost, she came to him and asked him to help her with a calendar she was trying to create. He gruffly shooed her away. This memory torments him and compels him to continue his quest. The brother-in-law, Amos, we learn, also had a long-standing and unspoken love for his brother's wife. So this quest, this almost unendurable quest, is begun on the most simple, honest, human terms. The novel is also about the women who populated this wilderness. For most it is a life of daily drudgery, but rewarded with the realization that they have truly created something out of nothing. Life for a young woman, with a young woman's desires and needs, is painted artistically as well. Le May displays a tremendous knowledge of Indian culture, specifically the Comanches, that is absolutely fascinating. We learn that they do not leave their dead on the battlefield. We learn about their burial customs, and what they think is important in the afterlife. They are magnificent horsemen, circling and interweaving nearer and nearer their enemy, giving them only the most meager and difficult of shots, and always allowing themselves a chance for a quick retreat. I was particularly interested to learn that their names can sometimes change over the course of a lifetime, and that they are not always as easily translatable as they would appear to be in TV westerns. Mart, who eventually learns the Comanche language, comments that a Comanche name known in the white world as "Big Red Food," would probably be more aptly translated as "Raw Meat." Also interesting is the bit of history we learn about West Texas. Apparently, before the Civil War, the Texas Rangers had mostly driven out the Comanche tribes. But after the war the Rangers were disbanded, the federal government did not keep its promise to police the area, and the natives gradually returned . . . with deadly results. But this is only the icing on the cake. The true joy of this novel is its sheer narrative force, and the compelling, descriptive nature of Le May's prose. Mart stands in the homestead kitchen after months on the prairie and is concerned that he smells bad. The author points out that his smell is really only juniper smoke, leather, and prairie wind, but that he couldn't have known that. A rider is shot, "his body crumpled as it hit, and rolled over once, as shot game rolls, before it lay still." Very descriptive, very observant, and only two small examples of the kind of thing to be found on practically every page. And last but certainly not least are the thematic implications stemming from the way the story ends. I am not going to give away anything, but will simply say that Amos, motivated by hate, comes to the end in a far different way than Mart, who is motivated by love. The last paragraph of this novel is splendidly powerful, and very rewarding.
It is the kind of novel that transcends the genre. Like Lonesome Dove, Mountain Man, Pemmican, or The Virginian, to name only a few, it is more than just a great western, it is a great novel.
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29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a great American story, December 18, 2000
These people had a kind of courage that may be the finest gift of man: the courage of those who simply keep on, and on, doing the next thing ... -Alan Le May (on the Texicans) It's muy chic in these days of political correctness to bemoan our ancestors' horrible misguided behavior in regards to the American Indians. In Leftist hindsight, the Indians have been converted into pastoral New Age environmentalists, facing off against a militaristic, technological behemoth. The novel The Searchers, basis for the great John Ford/John Wayne movie (The Searchers--1956), offers a necessary antidote to such fuzzy headed platitudinous twaddle. The story begins in 1868 Texas; neglected by the military during the Civil War and now subject to the naive Quaker administration of Indian affairs, white settlements are being rolled back by persistent murderous Comanche raids. Living at the very edge of civilization are Henry and Martha Edwards and their children, Lucy, Debbie, Ben and Hunter. The couple are assisted by the young man , Martin Pauley, who they virtually adopted when Comanches slaughtered his family, and by Henry's brother Amos, a quiet, taciturn man who seems to be irresistibly drawn back to the ranch time and again. But then one day Marty and Amos are lured away from the ranch when a Comanche party steals a herd of cattle. They pursue them for quite a distance before realizing that they have been tricked. By the time they arrive back at the Edwards ranch, it is in ruins, the parents and the boys are dead and scalped and the girls are missing. As every movie viewer knows, what ensues is a years long quest by Martin and Amos (Ethan in the movie) as they search for the girls. Martin is driven by a memory of how he ignored Debbie on her last day of life, Amos appears to be driven by darker demons. Eventually, Martin has an epiphany: Amos, Mart realized, no longer believed they would recover Lucy alive--and wasn't thinking of Debbie at all. Seeing Amos' face as it was tonight, Mart remembered it as it was that worst time of the world, when Martha lay in the box they had made for her. Her face looked young and serene, and her crossed hands were at rest. They were worn hands, betraying Martha's age as her face did not, with little random scars on them. Martha was always hurting her hands. Mart thought, "She wore them out, she hurt them, working for us." As he thought that, the key to Amos' life suddenly became plain. All his uncertainties, his deadlocks with himself, his labors without pay, his perpetual gravitation back to his brother's ranch--they all fell into line. As he saw what had shaped and twisted Amos' life, Mart felt shaken up; he had lived with Amos most of his life without ever suspecting the truth. But neither had Henry suspected it--and Martha least of all. Amos was--had always been--in love with his brother's wife. At first they are accompanied by Lucy's fiancé, but when he thinks that he has spied Lucy dancing around a fire in the Comanche camp, Amos brutally explains that what he's actually seen is a young buck wearing her scalp. The young man, driven mad, attacks the camp and is killed. From there on, Amos and Martin have only each other and Martin increasingly realizes that they do not share the same obsessions: Mart had noticed that Amos always spoke of catching up to "them"--never of finding "her." And the cold, banked fires behind Amos' eyes were manifestly the lights of hatred, not of concern for a lost girl. He wondered uneasily if there might not be a peculiar danger in this. He believed now that Amos, in certain moods, would ride past the child and let her be lost to them if he saw a chance to kill Comanches. In the coming years they survive Indian attacks, blizzards, comic misadventures, robbery attempts and the like as their search narrows in on Scar, a chief of the Wolf Clan. Along the way, Amos develops a grudging respect for Martin (even making him his heir) and the two become the stuff of legend, known to the Indians as "Bull Shoulders" (Amos) and "The Other" (Marty). This is historical fiction in the grand manor, combining an exciting story and extensive historical background to create the kind of mythos that is central to a nation's understanding of itself. What emerges is a more balanced sense of how precarious a situation these early white homesteaders faced as they pushed into Indian territory and, while not justifying racial hatred, it makes the animus between the races more understandable. This is a great American story, with an obvious debt to Moby Dick (Amos/Ahab, Marty/Ishmael, Scar/Moby); the movie will always preserve our memory of the tale, but it deserves to be read too. GRADE: A+
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There's a whole lot of story packed in these 270 pages!, October 10, 2006
Wow, I would never have believed how good this was. I remember being disappointed when the book arrived, because I had assumed such a big story would of course be a BIG book. I usually won't touch a book under 400 pages, the bigger the better. I was wrong in this case, what an awesome story -- five long years searching for little Debbie.
The characters were wonderful, many tragic moments where you want to just cry, and other moments along the way to make you laugh and smile. As another reviewer noted A++ indeed. Highly recommended.
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