Far Bright Star Book

3.5 stars

In the author's afterword to Far Bright Star, Robert Olmstead observes: "It seems we have never not been at war'our world, our country, our people'and there are those among us when the solemn call is made who are willing to answer. It seems to constitute the blood that flows through us. It is our inheritance." Such is the primary subject of Far Bright Star, told through the exploits of an expedition of American horse soldiers hunting Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1916. And such is the reason why Olmstead names the pair of brothers at the center of his narrative Napoleon and Xenophon, a rather bold move (and, excuse me, one of overkill) to drive his point home.

Napoleon takes center stage, once he sets out leading a patrol seeking signs of Villa. It's a fateful, disastrous journey, not because the patrol comes across its prey but because it becomes the prey of an armed militia, seemingly straight out of hell'or at least, straight out of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian¬'the militia being part of a larger rag-tag itinerant community led by a mysterious woman on a magnificent white horse. There's a ferocious battle and a ferocious aftermath involving captivity and ordeal. As with McCarthy, the violence is graphic and extreme.

For me, much of the novel's interest (besides it being a Western, a genre I'm much interested in and enjoy) centers on how Napoleon changes because of his experiences in battle and captivity. I'm not sure he experiences a full-blown case of what we now call PTSD, but he certainly comes to realize that that no one remains the same after a terrifying ordeal (I can attest to this'I once had a gun leveled at me for 15 minutes during a home invasion, and my experience is nothing compared with what Napoleon endures). And yet, as Olmstead underscores, Napoleon may have changed but the world hasn't, and so in a sense he is right back where he started from. At one point Napoleon reflects on the death of his old self and the world he now faces: "He knew he died out there and when he died the old world died with him, but it made no difference because the new world would likewise be a world of killing and in most ways indistinguishable from the old world." Or as elsewhere observes: "After the war was before the war."

While not possessing the richness and complexity of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (the influence is extensive, far beyond my comments earlier), nor the stark beauty of McCarthy's prose (but whose does?), Far Bright Star is a solid, well-paced novel vividly describing the terror and cruelty of war and the means that soldiers survive'or don't.