John is more than a clichéd cowboy and Jiles' descriptions are less boot-crushing-cigarette-butt macho prose and more sunlight-piercing-the-understory imagery.
Readers may quibble with some of Jiles’s plotting — a pair of fortuitous meetings, a deflating final twist — but there can be no quibbling with the dramatic tension in her rendering of the chaotic, wretchedly despoiled landscape Chenneville encounters.
Chenneville has a moral awakening, which, though honorable, badly undercuts the book’s dramatic payoff. Ms. Jiles tries to compensate with a sudden and rather schmaltzy love story involving a plucky Texas telegraphist named Victoria. But the sentimentality seems out of place—almost like an obsolete genre artifact—in a Western that is otherwise so vivid and uncompromising.
Themes of reinvention, accountability, and the power of all-consuming, single-minded focus will spark interest in fans of Geraldine Brooks, Karen Harper, and Jiles’ previous work.
As usual, Jiles impresses with vital characterizations, well-honed dialogue, and a granular depiction of the Old West. She also steeps readers in the lore of 19th-century technologies such as the telegraph, and dramatizes how it transformed society. This tale has true grit.
