The Berrybender Narratives (2004) (Book)

A series of four novels (the date given is the publication date of the last one) about the misadventures of an aristocratic English family on a hunting expedition in the west. I read them essentially as one entity in a big collection and I think it’s best to do so – the end points of the individual novels seem somewhat arbitrary so it’s unclear to me how well they would work on their own.

I’m a bit uncertain how I feel about this. The characters are universally well-written, internally believable and interesting (especially the protagonist Tasmin, who impulsively marries an unsuitable frontiersman who she fancies, and her father, the hedonistic patriarch of the clan, who selfishly continues on his hunting expedition even as it collapses around him). I wasn’t convinced it has a satisfying overarching story though: it’s more of a series of events that befall the family (and their hangers-on). In some ways that doesn’t matter, since it’s supposed to be a dark, tragic farce, and probably more about the characters and their reaction to the situations they end up in than an overall story. In that sense it succeeds in what it was trying to do (and I did enjoy reading it). However, it isn’t my favourite of Larry McMurtry’s work, and does feel slightly haphazard.