Product Description

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s. Their journey is one of exploration, beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day survival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted. By now, Tasmin is married to the elusive young mountain man Jim Snow (the "Sin Killer").

On his part, Jim is about to discover that in taking the outspoken, tough-minded, stubbornly practical young aristocratic woman into his teepee he has bitten off more than he can chew. Still, theirs is a great love affair and dominates this volume of Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, in which Tasmin gradually takes center stage as her father loses his strength and powers of concentration, and her family goes to pieces stranded in the hostile wilderness.

The Wandering Hill (which refers to a powerful and threatening legend in local Indian folklore) is at once literature on a grand scale and riveting entertainment by a master storyteller.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143740 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Wandering Hill, the second volume in Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, retains the humor of the first installment, Sin Killer, while establishing a more meditative mood. Picking up where Sin Killer left off, The Wandering Hill finds noble English family the Berrybenders waiting out the oncoming winter at a high plains trading post, delaying their hunting expedition through the frontier-era American west. Tight confines force the spirited, bickering Berrybenders to contend with one another, as well as an assortment of colorful attendants and raw trappers. Conflict has arisen between fiery and very pregnant heroine Tasmin and her stoical, evangelical mountain man husband Jim Snow, a.k.a. Sin Killer. Selfish, randy patriarch Lord Berrybender, having lost a leg, seven toes, and three fingers thus far on their journey (though not his "favorite appendage"), is slowly losing his sanity. Malicious youngest child Mary begins an odd pseudo-sexual friendship with naturalist Piet Van Wely, while "foppish" heir Bobbety's no less ambiguous relationship with priest Father Geoffrin inspires his father to accidentally stick his son in the eye with a fork. In between many such self-inflicted disasters, three children are born, fierce native tribes attack, a man is sewn into a buffalo carcass, and many lives are lost, often in the presence of a strange, mobile hill whose legendary appearance signals impending doom. McMurtry, meanwhile, continues the momentum he built with Sin Killer, offering graceful storytelling, wonderfully dimensional realism, and deadpan wit. The wintry Wandering Hill, however, diverges from Sin Killer's madcap activity to further consider the inner lives of many of its splendid characters. McMurtry will have his fans clamoring for an answer, though delighting in his wandering path toward a resolution. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly
This is the second volume in McMurtry's four-book series the Berrybender Narratives, following last year's Sin Killer. Set in 1833 along the banks of the Yellowstone River, the comedic melodrama mixes unwashed mountain men with an arrogant, obnoxious and uncouth family of English aristocrats in a saga of high violence, low morals and lusty copulation. Lord Berrybender and his brood of selfish bumbling children, servants and mistress are touring the American West, shooting every animal in sight. The lord is a one-legged, drunken satyr who cares only for his own pleasure, and pokes his son's eye out with a fork. The rest of the family is just as self-centered and irresponsible. Eldest daughter Tasmin, a vulgar, opinionated woman, is married to enigmatic mountain man Jim Snow, known as the Sin Killer for his fervent brutality in the punishment of sin (not his own, of course). He cannot understand why Tasmin willfully refuses to be more like his two Indian wives, silent, obedient and submissive. Still, their love is passionate and so are their fistfights. The English group and a bunch of smelly, hairy mountain men winter over at a trading post through months of quarrels, meanness and downright coarse behavior, while marauding Sioux under the command of a white man-hating war chief called the Partezon gruesomely torture and slaughter any white they can catch. McMurtry tosses in famous hunters and mountain men like Hugh Glass, Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick, plus a buffalo stampede, grizzly bears and an Indian ambush, but these are just props to support the soap-opera antics of the Berrybender clan. A few folks manage to get themselves killed, but there are plenty of annoying Englishmen left to people the next two volumes.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* This is the second volume in a projected four-part series following the aristocratic Berrybender family as they traverse various frontier river systems in the 1830s. As in the first installment, Sin Killer [BKL Ap 1 02], the feisty, passionate Tasmin Berrybender and her enigmatic, primitive husband, Jim Snow, occupy the center of the story. These two individuals are the most compelling and memorable of McMurtry's characters since Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call graced the pages of Lonesome Dove (1985). Now they and a fascinating cast of both fictional and historical characters interact in a wonderful pageant that re-creates the era of the mountain men who hunted and trapped along the upper Missouri and its tributaries. McMurtry offers a full range of Native American personalities, from chronically hostile Blackfeet to half-assimilated Utes to a frightening, sociopathic Lakota. The historical characters include a youthful Kit Carson, a grizzled Hugh Glass, and Pomp Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea. The latter was educated in Europe but is irresistibly drawn back to the frontier, and his efforts to navigate between two worlds are particularly poignant. The landscape is stunningly beautiful, but the beauty is often disrupted by spasmodic, gruesome violence. Nonetheless, this novel is an engrossing, exciting, and sometimes heart-rending saga of the American West that shows McMurtry at his best; and it will be in heavy library demand. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Part II of the Berrybender's Western Travels
This book picks up right where "Sin Killer" left off. Literally. I read these books consecutively and they could easily had been packaged as one six hundred pager.

This is not "Lonesome Dove" in several ways. Where any of the four Lonesome Dove books could be read as a stand-alone, I don't think The "Wandering Hill" would make any sense to someone who had not first read Sin Killer. McMurtry is also writing this series as a sort of Black Comedy. The characters are less well developed, the plot just conveniently happens and there is scant background or development. Just action and happenings.

As for the Black Comedy, think of an R-rated version of the old TV show "The Adams Family." Quirky characters abound, led by a loony father, unreal supporting characters and a strong female who by far possesses the most intense drive and assertiveness of any of the lot.

In this book, the Berrybenders and hangers-on -- reduced by Indian attacks, self-inflicted wounds, attempted familycide and the elements -- winter on the Yellowstone River before heading South toward Santa Fe.

Various Indians come into play and the fearsome "The Partezon" looms on the edge of the story, ready to strike havoc like Blue Duck or Mox Mox in McMurtry's other stories. Historical figures are also woven into the plot from Lewes and Clark's French guide Charbonneau to Kit Carson and other mountain men. The central part of the story remains the wily Tasmine, oldest of the Berrybender children and Jim Snow, aka "The Sin Killer" an American mountain man who alternates between remaining the wild loner of the range and Mr. Tasmine Berrybender now that he has fathered a child by his amazing English bride - a woman he can't begin to fathom and who astounds him at every turn.

This series remains quite a ride. The action -- much of involving fornication or rutting (as the characters put it) -- comes quickly and certainly page after page. Although thin with somewhat weakly drawn characters, McMurtry can still tell a good story.

McMurtry's Berrybender novels becoming epic classics
Larry McMurtry's The Wandering Hill is the second installment of his proposed tetralogy following a wealthy English family and their trek to the west in the 1830's. Whereas the first novel, Sin Killer, started slow and revealed a zany, action-packed tone, Hill charges straight out of the gates but mellows eventually to attach the reader closer to the glorious characters. This tetralogy is essentially one giant novel that will equal Lonesome Dove in characters and story. The writing combines subtle humor, fast-paced action, and startling violence that brings the reader directly into the savage world. If you have read Sin Killer, pick up The Wandering Hill immediately. If you haven't read Sin Killer, pick up both books and lose yourself in the exciting yet tragic world McMurtry has created.

Part of a great McMurtry series
You can read this as a stand-alone book, but I think it's better if you read it as it's intended: the second in a 4-book series, The Berrybender Narratives. It's a comic melodrama, typical of some of McMurtry's best stuff, that grabs up some unwashed heathens from the mountains and some arrogant English nobs, stirs them altogether on the banks of the Yellowstone River in the middle of the 1800s, and then stands back to watch with high glee as they try to get everything straightened out. Think of it as an American Western soap opera, and you won't be far wrong.
Enjoy it; it's not great literature, but it's a great read.