To Tame A Land

Novel Review

To Tame a Land by Louis L’Amour

I picked up To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour from Walmart the other day. I think it’s cool that he is still sold so widely and accessibly, despite being written damn near 60 years ago. I also think it’s cool that I am usually picking up the last copy or I find that his book is sold out. Regardless, had never really heard anything of To Tame a Land but it might be one of my new favorites.

This book is one of his classic westerns. Most would argue that all Louis L'Amour books were westerns, but from a genre perspective that's not quite true. A lot of his "westerns" are really adventure stories wearing western clothes, and adhere much more rigorously to the structure and tropes of an adventure novel than a western. Most Sackett books should be categorized as adventure with a few exceptions such as The Lonely Men or The Daybreakers. But overall, many of the books revolve around grand adventure, treasure hunting, revenge seeking or some mix of the three. And I realize I'm splitting hairs that a general audience might not care about, but genre and structure and tropes really kind of obsesses me. Regardless, I think what made To Tame a Land so good was the very deft merging of the two. If you want to read more of my thoughts on Western structure I recommend this essay, The New Western Myth.

The story starts with Rye Tyler and his father being abandoned by their wagon train in Indian Territory. They have broken a wheel and the Captain of the train, pining over the same girl as Rye's father, sees his chance to take some competition of the board. The Captain tells the pair that he will wait a day at the Springs up ahead, but can’t stop the whole train for them here. But when his father fixes the Wagon and they make it to the Springs late that night, they find that the train has not waited.

Forced to stop because their oxen are worn out, they are then attacked by Indians. Rye's father is killed, but Rye manages to escape. Rye isn't your average teenager though, and after recovering his father's body, he takes out after the war party and manages to kill two of them while they are sleeping. When he catches up to the wagon train, he confronts the Captain, who is then relieved of duty by the rest of the wagon train.

The train's scout, Logan Pollard, then takes Rye under his wing and teaches him all that he knows. The next few chapters are big sweeping montages of Rye learning how to track, how to hunt, how to draw. Pollard also gives him a copy of Plutarch’s Lives and tells him to try to read it five times.

One of the really fun things about this 154 page novel is that it really shows L'Amour’s talent for painting a sweeping saga in so little space. The literary power of "tell" versus "show" is on full display. One of the problems with "show don't tell" advice is that it is so vague as to be almost useless, and new writers or even seasoned writers often misinterpret it as every piece of information needs to be transmitted via a scene. This leads to bloat and clunkiness and scenes that slow the story down.

Of course, a skilled hand can "tell" in a way that still feels like "showing." It is essentially the literary version of a montage, which makes me wonder if the montage wasn't a cinema adaptation to try to capture the literary tool of "telling" in a visual form? Chicken and the egg stuff, probably. There's a lot of nuance in the whole "show don't tell" debate, too much for me to go over here. What I do know, is that most modern writing has no idea how to use tell very well and undercuts itself by not even really trying. Maybe it’s the screenplayification of the novel that led to this, or the glut of outright wrong and derivative advice that has been transmitted via craft books and blog posts since the indie boom.

What I am saying is that the ability to montage and/or transmit vast amounts of character or setting history in a page or two is a necessary and neglected literary skill. This sort of texture, depth, and richness is perhaps one of the main things that the novel has going for it when compared to all other forms of media. SO LEAN INTO IT. The third-person-limited-everything-must-be-learned-via-a-scene-and-dragged-out-over-four-books-and-two-thousand-words style of writing genre fiction is stale and lame and holding fiction in general back. It is but one of a million ways to skin a cat. Give me 64,000 words that I can’t stop thinking about.

And some of it is just knowing what the hell your story is about. A quarter of the way in, Rye guns down the wagon train captain that got his father killed at the beginning. L'Amour just nips the revenge arc you were starting to expect right in the bud. He does it because that isn't what the story is about. He didn't leave you hanging via a false promise. The book is about violence and reputation and living by the sword and the cost of it. And it sticks doggedly to that theme, and never gets sidetracked. I also mention this, because as writer’s we often feel compelled to follow false trails instead of sticking to the story we envisioned. Please trust your instincts! You’ll save time and pain.

Regardless, the rest of the book tracks Rye's developing skill and reputation with a gun. He doesn't take lip off of people, he's not after a reputation, he's not bloodthirsty, but he's just really fast on the draw. This means that before long, he has killed a few bad men with a reputation and is thus building one himself. The thing about a reputation though, is you are forced to prove it, even if you don't want to. And by the climax, when he finally has a way out of the gunfighter life, he has to make one last stand in order to save his love interest.

I won't say more, and have kept the plot vague to avoid spoilers. Recommend you don't read the back cover description as it gives away a key twist that I did not appreciate having spoiled. Low-key the world's worst back cover copy.

As an aside, I am constantly left intrigued by the morality of L'Amour characters. I don’t think morality in fiction gets talked about enough. A thread I am recognizing in most of the pulp hero’s we love is how Homeric they often are. Rye Tyler feels like an almost mythical realization of a Homeric or Byronic ideal. For example, in one scene, Rye is propositioned to a card game by card sharps, and instead of turning it down, he accepts, and then proceeds to cheat them by dealing himself aces off the bottom of the deck. When he has most of their money, he dips out with guns drawn. A page later he plays poker again, but notes that he doesn't cheat this time, because he is playing with honest men. That is a very homeric hair to split, and I love it. It’s a very specific sort of morality and character development that you find in the pulp paperbacks but gets kind of lost as media progressed.

Regardless, this is easily a top ten L'Amour book for me, and might take the record for most Plutarch mentions. (Inside joke here is that in almost every single L'Amour book a character either reads, references, or mentions Plutarch's Lives).

Thanks for Reading!