By Sorrow's River: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3 [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Larry McMurtry (Author)

Book Description

Series: Berrybender Narratives | Publication Date: November 4, 2003

In this tale of adventure, at once high-spirited and terrifying, set against the background of the West that Larry McMurtry has made his own, By Sorrow's River is an epic in its own right with an extraordinary young woman as its leading figure.

At the heart of this third volume of his Western saga remains the beautiful and determined Tasmin Berrybender, now married to the "Sin Killer" and mother to their young son, Monty, who, although Tasmin intends him to be an English gentleman like his grandfather, is at the moment living the childhood of a savage.

By Sorrow's River continues the Berrybender party's trail across the endless Great Plains of the West toward Santa Fe, where they intend, those who are lucky enough to survive the journey, to spend the winter. Along the way, Tasmin, whose husband, Jim Snow, has vanished off to scout ahead of them, falls in love with Pomp Charbonneau, only to see him killed by the ruthless commander of Spanish troops, while her father, Lord Berrybender, now reduced to limping along on one leg and a pair of crutches, increasingly makes a fool of himself by falling in love with his own mistress. They meet up with a vast cast of characters from the history of the West: Kit Carson, the famous scout; Le Partezon, the fearsome Sioux war chief; The Ear Taker, an Indian whose specialty is creeping up on people while they are asleep and slicing an ear off with a sharp knife; two aristocratic Frenchmen whose eccentric aim is to cross the Great Plains by hot air balloon; a party of slavers led by the cowardly but bloodthirsty Obregon; a band of raiding Pawnee; and many other astonishing characters who prove, once again, that the rolling, grassy plains are not, in fact, nearly as empty of life as they look. Most of what is there is dangerous and hostile, even when faced with Tasmin's remarkable, frosty sangfroid. She is one of the strongest and most interesting of Larry McMurtry's women characters, fairly resistant to shock, whether at bloodshed, the behavior of children, or sex, and at the center of this powerful and ambitious novel of the West.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this third volume of McMurtry's Berrybender Narratives, Lord Berrybender and his obnoxious, sniveling brood are, surprisingly, still alive on the dangerous Great Plains of Wyoming and Colorado. The wry story of mountainman adventure and European stupidity, set in the 1830s, is just as wacky and gruesome as its predecessors, Sin Killer and The Wandering Hill. Lord Berrybender is a pompous, lecherous, drunken, one-legged English aristocrat on a hunting expedition in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Surrounded by his four willful and opinionated daughters, inept servants and a haughty mistress, he is protected by an accompanying group of unwashed mountainmen and trappers. His eldest daughter, the vulgar and loudmouthed Tasmin, is married to Indian fighter Jim Snow, aka Sin Killer, and their marital relations are anything but blissful. In this installment, the hunting party slowly travels from its winter camp in the north, southward toward Santa Fe, on a journey filled with seduction, infidelity, short tempers, heat, thirst, Indian attacks and ever more lusty copulation. The sudden and unlikely arrival of two European journalists in a hot air balloon brings more tragic comedy to the prairie soap opera; other irritants include a smallpox epidemic, a mysterious Indian who cuts off the ears of sleeping white men and a murderously insane Mexican army captain. McMurtry's Europeans are all idiots, while the Indians and mountainmen, including Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick and Hugh Glass, are portrayed as honorable men. The Berrybender clan is so annoying one wishes they would all be massacred by the Indians, but enough of them survive to ensure there will be plenty of Berrybenders to kill off in the next installment. One can only hope.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A party of Ute warriors placidly negotiates the price of trade goods with a group of mountain men whose encampment they had murderously raided the previous day. A pair of slightly absurd European travelers manages to escape menacing Sioux by inflating a hot-air balloon and flying over their stupefied foes. This is the third installment of the projected four-volume Berrybender saga, which tracks a British family and a motley assortment of comrades as they traipse across the trans-Mississippi West in the 1830s. As in the earlier novels, the focus of the narrative is Tasmin Berrybender and her strange (even to her) attachment to her husband, the rather primitive frontiersman Jim Snow. As the Berrybenders move from South Pass toward Santa Fe, McMurtry relates numerous, seriocomic incidents like those above, revealing the West as a place where irony, vanity, and tragedy are inevitably intertwined. Tasmin and Jim are certainly wonderful literary creations; equally interesting and memorable are McMurtry's finely drawn portrayals of actual historical characters, including Kit Carson, Jim Bridges, Charles Bent, and Pomp Charbonneau. Each plays his part in an exciting, humorous, but often heartbreaking story that unfolds across magnificent, dangerous, and often deadly landscapes. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 347 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (November 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743233042
• ISBN-13: 978-0743233040
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #916,647 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars MCMURTRY FLINT AND STEEL, November 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: By Sorrow's River: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3 (Hardcover)

Many people ask me just what it is I see in the works of Larry McMurtry. After all, if taken at face value, McMurtry's stories sometimes seem to be dominated by earthy, carnal themes and the trashy characters involved in them.

My response to such queries is simple. As with all good literary works, I believe that one needs to look beyond McMurtry's stories and characters to the foundational dynamics that are there.

"By Sorrow's River" invites the thoughtful reader to do just that. Yes there is the willful,[...]Tasmin, along with the rest of the Berrybender entourage, but there is also the innocent, constant, strong and noble Jim Snow, who, despite Tasmin's best efforts, remains his own person, living by his own creed and is never pulled down to her level. McMurtry's juxtaposition of the tawdry and the timeless explores that which is fleeting and that which is firm. Inevitably the firm and constant wins out and, like the meeting of frontier flint and steel, sparks fly. The warmth generated by such meetings is compelling and brings me back to McMurtry's work again and again and again.

"By Sorrow's River", along with "Sin Killer" and "The Wandering Hill", taken at face value by western "purists" (or perhaps "delusionists" might be a better description--and there is certainly nothing wrong with the delusion of the west) are likely very frustrating. But when read like all other great literature--panning through the slime and silt in search of the nuggets that are invariably there--the results can be extremely rewarding and yes, I believe that "By Sorrow's River has gold there in abundance.

Those interested in western stories for the sake of western stories, in the stereotypical west where everything falls into its proper and probable place, should stick with Louis L'Amour. Nothing against L'Amour, mind you. Let's just see, accept and appreciate the differences.

Douglas McAllister

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tasmin becomes difficult, July 10, 2005

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: By Sorrow's River: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3 (Mass Market Paperback)

In 1832, Lord Albany Berrybender chartered a steamboat to take him up the Missouri River on a hunting expedition. Albany is one of the richest aristocrats in England, and also a dissolute, selfish, old fool. Along for the ride are his wife Constance, six of their fourteen spoiled children, fifteen of nineteen servants, including a cellist and a botanist, an aging parrot named Prince Talleyrand, the staghound Tintamarre, and a gaggle of American talent hired to ease their way, including Toussaint Charbonneau, the guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition many years previous.

In BY SORROW'S RIVER, a year and two books later, Lord Berrybender has since lost a leg; his wife, two children, assorted servants, Prince Talleyrand, and Tintamarre are dead. Berrybender's eldest daughter, Tasmin has borne a child to her mountain man husband, Jim "Sin Killer" Snow, and is now pregnant with a second. Another daughter, Bess, takes up with a Ute brave, High Shoulders, and a third daughter, Mary, loses her virginity to the botanist, Piet Van Wely. Berrybender himself marries the cellist, Vicky Kennet, and gets her with child. And finally, after much aimless wandering in the second book of the series, THE WANDERING HILL, the fecund group is off to Santa Fe accompanied by a ragtag group of mountain men and hangers-on.

It's only in this book that the series really takes off for me, mostly due to the fact that its chief protagonist, Tasmin, is becoming engagingly difficult. Increasingly disenchanted with her husband, Tasmin casts lustful looks at Jean Baptiste "Pomp" Charbonneau, the son of Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea born on Lewis and Clark's epic trek to the Pacific. Moreover, Tasmin has a soft spot in her heart for the young Kit Carson. Trouble is, Pomp has barely a prurient thought in his head, and Kit is too busy becoming a famous scout.

What makes BY SORROW'S RIVER particularly interesting are the historical characters that sprinkle the narrative: Carson, the elder and younger Charbonneaus, mountain men Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, and Tom Fitzpatrick, and traders William and Charles Bent, who established Bent's Fort in present-day Colorado. Having said that, it's because author Larry McMurtry occasionally plays fast and loose with the historical record that I found this fictional narrative unreasonably irritating at times. When reading this book, keep in mind that Carson didn't marry (his third wife) Josefina Jaramillo until 1843, and Pomp Charbonneau died in 1866 at Innskip Station, OR. Does Larry's version represent careless research, or just unconscionable literary license?

With this third book in the series, the Berrybender saga is finally attaining some of those qualities of excellence that characterized, McMurtry's classic, LONESOME DOVE. Despite my reservations regarding the glaring historical inaccuracies, I just may immediately begin the fourth and final installment, FOLLY AND GLORY, without stopping to vary my reading fare. For the moment, I'm hooked.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars More of the same in tetralogy, November 12, 2003

By 

Ron Franscell, Author of 'Sourtoe Cocktail Club' - See all my reviews

This review is from: By Sorrow's River: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3 (Hardcover)

As the third installment of Larry McMurtry's four-part frontier epic -- "a story of love, passion and death" -- hits stands, many readers are wondering if the Berrybender Narratives are really Old World farces wrapped in a buffalo robe, or merely a confabulation of odd characters acting out an exceedingly long matinee on the vast stage of the West.

To be honest, it's not easy to tell. While some scenes in "By Sorrow's River" -- part three in the tetralogy that started with "Sin Killer" and "The Wandering Hill" -- are occasionally absurd and hilarious, others are grisly and exceedingly violent. So maybe it's unwise to pigeon-hole these three books as simply "farce" or "western epic." Nor is it clear if McMurtry is pushing the limits of modern commercial storytelling, or just churning out a long story filled with an extraordinary collection of characters who don't intimately engage.

Nonetheless, "By Sorrow's River," continues the saga of the assertive and independent Lady Tasmin Berrybender as her peculiar British family continues on a western expedition in the 1830s, the days of trappers, scalpers and traders. In this segment, the action all takes place between a Green River rendezvous in the Rockies and Mexico.

Still, while the character elements of a first-class farce are in place, the story simply doesn't unfold farcically. It's not even a very good western saga, when one considers its author previously told the greatest western epic ever in "Lonesome Dove." The simultaneous beauty and menace of the western landscape is not as integral, for one. How awful for an artist to have set the bar too high too soon!

So if book reviews are essential consumer advocacy, a conclusion is not difficult: If you liked "Sin Killer" and "The Wandering Hill," you'll find "By Sorrow's River" as delightful as a third helping of dessert. If you didn't, you'll likely not find anything to kindle your interest here. And if you haven't read any of them, don't start with the third installment, for heaven's sake.

This book's strength is in its rapidly unfolding action, but its characters are nowhere near as deftly drawn nor as sympathetic -- nor even as entertaining -- as such icons as Gus McCrae, Aurora Greenway or Sonny Crawford. Tasmin Berrybender is the most fully developed, but remains less engaging. An author's characters needn't supercede their forebears, but it's difficult to explain if a consummate character-builder like McMurtry suddenly isn't turning out legendary characters any more.