Riders of the Purple Sage Book

Summary:

Sage sage sage sage, sage sage Mormon sage. Purple sage sage sage and Gentiles, sage sage sage sage and sage. Sage! Sage sage sage sage riders sage sage. Sage sage if sage sage thunder. Sage sage sage; sage sage sage sage. Mormons sage sage sage sage, sage sage shot, sage sage sage sage. And sage sage.

There were some other words and stuff, but really this book is about sage. Mormons, Gentiles, and some other things are mentioned, but the focus is on the sage. The color of the sage, the things in the sage, the way the sage looks, the way the sage feels, the sage the sage the sage. I took to counting the amounts of times the word 'sage' was used - 237 . This isn't a big book. Do the math. That's a lot of freaking uses of the word 'sage'. Sometimes Grey would get clever and hyphenate words: sage-slope, sage-bordered, sage-riders, sage-brush... but that doesn't trick me. It still tastes the same, no matter how you cook it. Clearly the words 'plant' and 'shrub' were considered too dull for use in this story.

Did you know the sage was purple? It was ALL PURPLE. There was a lot of purple sage. There's no other way to describe such a sight.


All of this aside, the story actually isn't so bad. It's hard to muddle through some of the especially purple prose (for lack of a better phrase - like sage, prose can only be purple), but I was surprised that there's an actual story here. An interesting one at that. Wikipedia calls the story "complex" and I can't say I disagree. I don't know Westerns very well. I watched a lot of reruns of The Lone Ranger when I was a kid (and harbored a weird kid-sized crush on Clayton Moore as a result) but that was pretty much it. I don't like John Wayne. Since we weren't allowed to play games as children that might have been remotely violent, the concept of playing Cowboys and Indians was probably out of the picture. As I got older the idea of reading a Western never appealed much to me, and as an adult working in a bookstore I realized that those Longarm books by Tabor Evans are the male equivalent of Harlequin romances read by so many women. (Hello, LONGARM, that's dirty.)

And Louis L'Amour? Snooze.

My point here is that I have always expected Westerns to be sort of... formulaic. And boring. Lots of guns and dust and prejudiced comments about women and their place in the world.

But then once upon a time about nine years ago I took a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh to Memphis to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. And on the way there (or maybe the way back) I looked up from whatever book I was reading at the time (I know it wasn't a Western) to find we were stopped in downtown Zanesville, Ohio. ZANESVILLE. Whut.

There wasn't much to Zanesville that I could see and I don't think more than one person actually got on the bus at that point (he might have been the sole person living in Zanesville for all I knew). But here's the thing I decided after that trip and stopping for 5-10 minutes in the town where Zane Grey was born: One day I would read a novel by Zane Grey.

Of course the minute I got home I put the thought out of my head because there were prettier, shinier books that should be read. Then a couple years ago I found this book in the clearance section and realized I had no more excuses. It had to be read. So I bought it. And then promptly forgot about it. Because that's how I roll.

What matters is that I read it now, I made good on my promise to Zane Grey and the entire town of Zanesville (population 25K+). I always sort of thought this was his first novel, but it turns out he wrote at least nine books before this one - that this one happens to be his best-known.

Despite everything above, I honestly did not hate this book. It was actually a little exciting in parts (in the same way I found The Lone Ranger exciting as a kid watching it on TV), but I was so horribly distracted by the amount of repetition included. I assume this is because Grey himself wasn't actually a writer to begin with - according to my copy's introduction, he was a dentist first, only beginning to write at the prompting of his wife.

I am interested to see how his writing in some of his other books stack up. This particular book ended so suddenly (another annoyance) that I probably need to at least read the sequel, The Rainbow Trail. I'm not a huge fan of cliff-hangers and this book has one. And I'm dying to know if The Rainbow Trail has as much freaking sage, or if Grey moves on to new words. Like 'trail'.