I argued back and forth with myself quite a bit before I wrote this review. But I’ll get to that. Also, there are some minor spoilers scattered throughout this post, but no more than you find in a lot of book reviews.
First of all, look at this opening line: “My name is Tatton Chantry and unless the gods are kind to rogues, I shall die within minutes.” Isn’t that great? With an opening line like that, how can you not want to keep reading?
It’s the late 16th Century as this novel opens, and our narrator/protagonist Tatton Chantry (not actually his real name, as author Louis L’Amour alludes to often) is an Irishman who has already lived an adventurous life. He has traveled to the New World on an English trading vessel and is marooned on what will someday be the Carolina coast when Indians attack a shore party. While escaping from the Indians, he runs into a group of Spaniards and Peruvians who were also stranded there when their ship began to sink. Chantry suspects treachery from the Spaniards, falls in love with a beautiful Peruvian aristocrat, and meets another castaway who has been living on these barrier islands for a couple of years.
All this leads up to a long flashback that takes up about two-thirds of the book and tells us about Chantry’s life as a fugitive in England and Scotland (his father in Ireland was murdered, and the family estate was destroyed), his various meetings with various scoundrels, gypsies, friends, and enemies, and his efforts to make himself into a master swordsman. Eventually he becomes a successful trader and even a published author of novels, poems, and plays. Then he’s a mercenary soldier and fights in various wars all over Europe before circumstances finally take him to America and we’re back where we started. It’s a busy life.
Now we get to the arguing with myself part. I always feel like when a Western writer says anything negative about Louis L’Amour, there’s a perception of sour grapes. Sometimes it’s more than just a perception, although I honestly don’t think that’s true in this case. But I finally decided to forge ahead with it anyway.
The framing sequence in this book that’s set in the New World is terrific. By itself, it would have made a fine short novel. Tatton Chantry is a tough, likable protagonist and you can’t help but root for him. The flashback is a different story, no pun intended. There are some wonderful scenes in it, but a lot of it just goes on and on and serves very little function. Again and again, L’Amour sets up some plot twist or new storyline, and then totally ignores it for the rest of the book, leaving things unexplained. What’s Chantry’s real name? Why is his life in danger if he ever returns to Ireland? Who’s that mysterious woman? What about the guy who keeps popping up to pull his chestnuts out of the fire? Who’s he? We don’t know. L’Amour never tells us.
There are also numerous continuity glitches of the sort he was notorious for. Chantry has a bag of gold, then he loses it, then he has it again with no explanation. It’s day, then it’s night, then it’s day again, all while one scene is going on. L’Amour said he never revised his work, never even looked at it again after he wrote the first draft. Mistakes like that certainly seem to indicate he was telling the truth.
At the same time, the settings are rendered beautifully, the dialogue is always good, and the ending of this one is great. L’Amour doesn’t hold back on the epic showdown between Chantry and his longtime mortal enemy, and it’s very satisfying.
So my overall opinion of FAIR BLOWS THE WIND is about as mixed as you can get. It’s one of several books from late in L’Amour’s career I never got around to reading, and I’m glad I finally did. It’s mostly entertaining and kept me turning the pages, but it’s also a prime example of the things about his writing that bother me. I suspect that mileage may vary a lot from reader to reader on this one. Like all of L’Amour’s work, it’s been reprinted numerous times and is available in just about any format you can think of. The image above just happens to be the paperback edition I read.
8 comments:
Ha! I just finished reading this book for the first time over the weekend. My feelings about it were decidedly mixed, unfortunately. I'm not a western writer so I can't be accused of sour grapes about L'Amour and I agree with every single point you made in the review.
I'm always glad to know it's not just me.
I lost interest in reading L'Amour when I read his comments about never reviewing or revising. As a magazine writer I know reviewing and polishing is part of the writing process. Not doing so seems to show a lack of respect for your reader.
Like many, Louis L'Amour was my entry into westerns, but I've mostly outgrown him. I just find is protagonists too preachy, and the whole "westerners good, easterners bad" thing grows tiresome. That's one of the things I like about Donald Hamilton's The Big Country, how it flips that around.
So nowadays I have to take L'Amour in small doses. He's entertaining, but I feel like something is often holding his books back from being better than they end up being. Like Flint. That was shaping up to be a great novel, but he wussed out on the ending (if you know, you know) and again with easterners being incompetent (I'm not an easterner btw!)
I feel like Luke Short deserves the household name recognition L'Amour has. He's not talked about near enough imo.
Well, he cut his teeth in the pulps. That was pretty much par for the course, wasn't it? I imagine a lot of western authors were that way due to starting in the pulps.
The story I've heard is that in the early Sixties, Bantam went to Fred Glidden, who wrote as Luke Short, and wanted to give him a contract for three books a year. Glidden turned them down, thinking he couldn't write that many. So then Bantam turned to L'Amour and made him the same offer, which, of course, he snapped up, and they gave him a big publicity push, too, as sort of a jab at Glidden. I don't have any proof this happened, but it fits the evidence.
I read a lot of L'Amour when I was younger but I tend to gravitate more to Elmer Kelton these days it feels more real to me than what L'Amour writes. I am surprised that he and Johnston are still vying for the limited western space on bookshelves. I hear that mass market paperbacks are coming to an end I weep to hear this and wonder if L'Amour and Johnston will survive this since I don't recall seeing either in the trade paperback
Some of the Johnstones have been coming out first as trade paperbacks for several years, with mass market editions following a few months later. Some have been done first as hardcovers, followed by mass market editions. Starting last month, most will be trade paperback originals and some will be hardcovers followed later by trade paperbacks, but the program definitely is continuing for now, although the number of books per year has been cut quite a bit. I don't know the plans for the L'Amours, but I can't imagine them going away entirely.
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