Customer Reviews

Tehano: A Novel

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From the moment I began reading Allen Wier's TEHANO, I was struck by the sheer immensity of the research that went into this tale's telling. Wier is able to include historical, biblical and ethnographic scholarship that informs all levels of his narration, thus making for a rich reading experience, but none of this ever gets in the way, is never obtrusive.

There is a strong and sure realism at work here, but not the hyper-realism of some such as Robbe-Grillet, for example, and Wier never loses his perspective with it, whether he is giving the reader an overview from a hawk's vantage point, or a close-up
in miniature of two people in love, tribes in battle or any one of the many meetings, partings and diremptions which mark the fate of many characters in the book. Just as he handles the human condition with balance and insight and compassion, Wier also manages to keep the reader cognizant of larger forces at play, of the Civil War and slavery, of Westward expansion 'Manifest destiny' and, for many characters, an almost reflexive genocidal impulse.

TEHANO is written with a respect for story telling and a reverence for the West and I think Allen Wier's achievement here, beyond the book's scope and ambition, is a seamless melding of history and literature sewn together with such skill it is hard to find a flaw in the skein. The end of the book, which does as one reviewer suggested, come so soon, is never telegraphed and involves some genuinely masterful and intricate choreography that gives the narrative the shape of a river flowing from headwaters to mouth, expanding here, constricting there, coming finally to that place where it can no longer contain all the creatures in its wake.
There is great violence, great compassion and great humanity here, the work of a thoughtful writer who still believes in the virtues of strong-telling through strong narrative.

You need this book. As a reader and a bibliophile, I promise that you will not be disappointed.

Before you even begin to read, the heft of the book assures you of many happy hours. It is a satisfying size that promises days spent in the past. The tintype photos on the front provide realism and ask to be decoded. The colors of the jacket and cover are of the Old west's worn saddles and Victorian wallpaper, and the creamy pages and font hearken back to cowboy times when people read the long evenings away.

I taught myself to read when I was three and picked books thereafter for their size because I felt so bereft when my time with the characters was through. In seventh grade, I read all that Dickens had to offer and have searched since for that same feeling of being caught up with people and being surprised at every chapter with new connections and harrowing adventures for my favorites. This book took me back to those delicious afternoons when I had nothing to do but read and could stay with my new friends until the end, laughing, crying, and shaking with fright until they were safely home.

Although the tale is epic, the big plot moves in ever smaller spirals as the characters meet each other. There is an intimacy and a believable quality to the intersection of these disparate lives. It would be tempting for an author, in the grand sweep of such a plot to focus on events rather than flesh out the characters, but these characters are drawn with satisfying detail. Each chapter is written with the finely honed care of a short story where economy of words is necessary, yet the reader will know the people well after the first introduction of each. The minor characters are a delight and often provide humor and respite from the more intense action. They are as carefully crafted as the major characters and certainly as memorable. You will be able to see and hear these people long after you put the book down.

The intricacy of the plot is easily followed because of a character list with short descriptions, chapter headings and subheadings, and the connecting thread of Gideon the undertaker's journal. The theme of twin ship is threaded throughout as well as the idea of freedom, not just from slavery but from parental expectation, social convention, and personal demons from the past. The reader does not have to wait for the ending to view redemption. Small victories are sprinkled throughout. A particularly poignant chapter describes two escaped slaves, Knobby and Elizabeth, viewing the ocean for the first time. Never having left the plantation, they are baptized in the waves and healed by the salty water as they speak marriage vows to each other.

The large cast of characters provides favorite moments for each type of reader. You will find romance, battle, action, history, mystery, family drama, faith, fables, domestic fiction, slave narrative, and travelogue. The sensual detail used for even the minor events provide a sumptuous feast. The author has used stunning imagery with a gritty, photographic quality. A reader may often have a reading experience where he can picture a character and perhaps even hear their voice through skillful point of view, but in this book, you can even smell the sweat of labor or the cheap perfume of the whorehouse, and you can taste the salty bite of oysters as Knobby and Elizabeth eat seafood for the first time or savor the sweet treats that Gideon the undertaker loves even more than beer.

Without being preachy, the author takes the reader deep into the Native American culture to see that all peoples have more in common than we would like to admit. While the more violent aspects of Indian life are not sugarcoated, they are balanced with the powerful love that families have for one another and the impending sense of a way of life ending. The Indian perspective is balanced with that of the white settlers, and the reader sees that nobody was right in this conflict that led to senseless killing on both sides. A balanced portrayal of the rich and poor is also shown along with the struggle between con men and immigrants and believers and unbelievers. Characters on both sides of each issue are likeable and interesting. No stock villains are shown here.

While many characters make choices that would cause the reader to wince and there is much cruelty as one would expect when reading about the Old West accurately depicted, there is a hope and tenderness here as well. There are sinners who keep their word and saints who stray. The only disappointment about this book is that it ends too soon.

You have found the perfect summer read, but even at the first reading, Tehano is a book that you know you will be reading again and for years to come.

A wonderful read - an imagined world full of vividly realized characters, places, and stories. I say stories because there are four major story lines and several minor ones, all of which play out between Manhattan and Matamoros, Mexico in the latter part of the Civil War and the early postwar years. The characters include soldiers and ex-soldiers both Blue and Gray running from the war, native Americans under siege once the war no longer occupied the whites, slaves escaping their masters, and multitudes of Midwestern farmers, speculators, and freebooters of all kinds looking for a new start or a quick killing. This is multistranded historical fiction in the tradition of Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, and Charles Frazier: storytelling that pays close attention to landscapes and to the vernacular, everyday customs, and artifacts - in a word, the culture - of the people. The experience of reading TEHANO is like tuning a guitar, with the various story lines constituting the strings. When you put on new strings, you start out with a lot of slack, so you can wind the string several times around the tuning gear to make the string hold tight. As you twist the tuner and the wire pulls taut, you begin to hear a tone, a pitch, and the tighter you wind the wire, the clearer and more focused the tone. As you do this string after string, each one makes its own sound, but it's unclear for awhile how the individual sounds cohere. The last step is the final tuning, when you adjust the strings to each other, bringing each one into relationship with the others so that the ensemble creates a harmonious whole. The novel had that kind of effect on me, with the various "strings," after having been slowly tightened during the first 600 pages, finally becoming aligned and tuned together in the last 100 or so pages. At the end, I felt I was indeed holding a finely tuned instrument.

Well, where to begin....there are some great story lines in this novel. However, the scope of the novel is just too ambitious to bring together for a satisfactory ending -- which is a mess. Throughout the course of the story, too many loose ends are left hanging, and too many questions are left unanswered. I highly suspect that Weir wrote the ending first then attempted to weave the characters' sagas together into one story after he knew how it would all end. When the story finally reaches its conclusion, the characters seem wooden whereas they were viable and dynamic early on. Either Weir bombed with the last 1/4 of the book because he didn't know what to do with this large cast of characters once they were assembled in the same setting, or he was trying for some existentialist tale about the casual violence of the wild west and the lack of interest in it from onlookers. Frankly, I no longer cared much about it either as I turned the final pages of the book.

As a 6th generation Texan with more than a passing interest in history, I did find a couple of (minor)historical inaccuracies in the novel -- I won't reveal them here as I don't want to spoil the parts of the story that are really good, but they bothered me nontheless. In addition, Weir gets tangled up in some of his own details about characters and events; either he or his editor should have caught those mistakes.

So, I feel the story just doesn't ring true at the end. This, coupled with too much meandering once the story really gets going, caused me to draw on sheer fortitude and will in order to read to the finish. The ending was entirely predictable --- from about halfway through the story. I really wanted to like this book as I love stories about the frontier. Oh well. The picture on the cover is outstanding!

Tehano is a fascinating book that's difficult to describe in a brief review. It reflects both the early twenty-first century in which the author lives and the mid-nineteenth century that he describes.

Tehano's graphic portrayals of sex and violence, its insistence that all cultures can justify their own brutalities on their own terms, and its refusal to draw easy, totalizing moral conclusions make it seem contemporary indeed. But its affection for individual characters, its delight in the storytelling impulse, and its combination of intricacy and accessibility remind me of much nineteenth-century fiction. It's a sprawling novel, with about twenty major characters and hundreds of minor ones. If you like to get lost in a book--to have the experience that you're no longer reading words and sentences, but that you're directly apprehending a world at least as real as the one that you inhabit on an everyday basis--then I think you'll spend an enjoyable week with Tehano.

Major details about setting, plot, and characters are readily available, so I won't repeat them here. I'll just add that the book contains several "character transformations" that are surprisingly convincing: my favorites are the young, uncertain Dorsey Murphy who becomes the self-assured Blood Arrow, wife of Wahatewi; and the conniving, red-haired Orten Trainer who re-invents himself as the scalped, tongueless, authentically pious Preacher Orten.

Once you declare a novel brilliant, you may as well stop. But you have to go on, a while, at least, because almost every book published is declared brilliant in print, by someone, eventually. Same problem with masterpiece. Tehano is brilliant, a masterpiece. Unique is perhaps more useful and alluring--Tehano is all that. And more. Once you have gone this far, what you can possibly go on to say is something under every heading--character, narrative, meaning. All three are brilliant, masterful, unique. This above all, Wier's style is a singular achievement in our time [say, 100 years, since 1910]. His style, line by line, invokes a muttering "Wish I had written that line." The neglect of this novel by critics stuns me, as Melville's few readers were stunned when MOBY DICK first appeared. Now I am getting steamed, so I will quit, after these two words: "Read Tehano." David Madden

I found this book by a happy accident. I recommend it to any reader who has an interest in the American West. The historical research is accurate and fascinating and the language used has the feel of the period. The characterisation is engrossing and the differing values and beliefs of two different cultures is brilliantly structured. Even if you are not a lover of the "western"- view this as an historical novel and you will be very well rewarded
The book has an epic style and each person fits into their role in the telling. It is a book for grown ups and I would reccomend it highly. I don't keep many books as there is always another one to read on the shelves - this one stays on my shelf for keeps!

This book is a hodge-podge of poorly drawn , unbeliveable characters, careening around in an unfathamable plot. I read two chapters, perused the rest and threw it away