There was a flutter of bookish furore last month when author Cólm Toibín said he only reads highfalutin’ books, he’s too smart for anything else. (At least, that was the gist of it – he might not have used those words exactly.)
Inland by Téa Obreht, is a book I imagine Toibín might have on his nightstand. Billed by marketers as “the literary event of 2019”, it packs Arizona settlements, early printing presses, the US Camel Corps, law, religion, the occult, greed, mysticism and much more into 367 pages of considered, lyrical prose reminiscent of Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End.
I confused myself by disliking this book on first read and then, when going back a second time to dig for something to say, being absolutely blown away. What to say at all, then? I suppose this book is everything you’d expect the literary event of 2019 to be: sweeping, confident, ambitious, well-researched and difficult.
My reason for disliking it the first time around is: I got lost. Obreht uses sentences that lead us, in a single clause, back decades, never to return. The first paragraph begins “When those men rode down to the fording place last night”, then jumps, a few lines later, from “last night” to “since long before we fell in together, when I first came round to myself, six years old . . .” and goes on to describe the narrator’s life from age six onwards. It requires concentration and patience to get used to these twisting paths.
It's been eight years coming but this literary western will likely invite similar adulation
Likewise, Obreht plays a confusing trick of using words to mask and reveal in equal measure. That same protagonist narrates to an unnamed “you” who turns out, chapters later, to be his camel, Burke. This information seems to be withheld on purpose, perhaps to create tension or mystery, but it would have been much more affecting to know early on what we were supposed to be imagining.
Once you get with the rhythm of Inland, though, it really packs a punch. There are lots of details, but – and this takes a while to grasp – none of them is redundant. In fact, they contain depth that seems bottomless. Obreht’s debut, The Tiger’s Wife, won the Orange Prize for its mythic depiction of the Balkan wars. It’s been eight years coming but this literary western will likely invite similar adulation.
Two alternating storylines prevail: that of Nora, a frontierswoman in the drought-ridden Arizona territory awaiting the return of her husband (gone in search of water), and her two elder sons (absent for reasons unknown to her); and Lurie, an immigrant outlaw moving westward across America and taking up with various gangs, among them a camel brigade and his noble steed, Burke.
Not many people have heard of the US’s experiment to use camels as freight animals in the 1850s. The experiment failed, and now the image of “the little black line of [camel] silhouettes” flickering across the great plains of America seems a far-flung fiction. But it happened, and Obreht’s rendering of it provides much narrative fodder.
When Lurie first comes upon the “clownish monsters” in Indianola, they incite “a fresh round of insults” from the townspeople. “Didn’t matter how far they’d journeyed”, we are told, “didn’t matter if they could fly, they still didn’t look right”. Just like Lurie, who is “easy to peg” because he’s “a weird little monkey” and a “small Hirsute Levantine”, the camels are out-of-place, unwelcome immigrants in a strange land. As a metaphor for what this story represents, the awkward animals are perfect.
Back to Nora’s story. As a frontierswoman, she is effectively an immigrant, too, though unlike Lurie, she is bound to her abode; stuck waiting. Towards the beginning of her section, she recalls her husband writing the words “Emmet, Nora and their boys lived and were happy here” on a ledge above their headboard. Yet she cannot quite marry herself to the idea that they were ever happy in this place. That very day they had visited the empty house of her neighbours, who “had pulled up stakes [. . .] without warning. Gone without goodbye, in the custom of surrender”. There is always the threat that the land will defeat them. It already claimed their young daughter, Evelyn, to heatstroke and the child’s spectre, if nothing else, ties Nora to this home of theirs, yet it always feels precarious and threatened.
So we get two disparate stories that slowly overlap: metaphorically, allegorically, and eventually, in a luminous final chapter, narratively. Inland is not an easy read. But it is moving and learned, and it reminds us how the history of America has always been about trying to create a home in a hostile place: about wrestling with the cruelties and realities of a land that existed centuries before, and will continue to exist centuries after, these passers-through are gone.
