Territory [Anglais] [Relié]

There are now less than a handful of authors whose hardcovers I will pick up without reading at least to Chapter Two. Emma Bull is one of that handful. She's only produced a few books in her literary career, but I find her writing to be as finely honed as Damascus steel--with a terrible beauty to match. If I had checked and realized that "Territory" was a Western, I might not have even read it.

That would have been a big mistake.

Most people who know my book habits would describe me as a voracious reader. If I like a book, I'll devour it in one sitting. In this case, I took a week to drink in the setting and the people and to occasionally read back.

"Territory" takes place in Tombstone, AZ, circa 1881. The town is barely in its toddler stage, born of greed and men's need to find a new life.

Bull's point of view characters are Mildred Benjamin, a recent widow, who works as a typesetter for the local paper and writes serial fiction on the side. Jesse Fox is an Eastern educated drifter who started out training to be a mining engineer til he discovered he had a talent for horse training. Fox has been told by a Chinese physician, Chow Lung, that he has a gift for magic and should use it. Til now, Fox has postponed that suggestion.

Mildred and Fox both discover there is dark magic afoot in Tombstone. More than once magician is fighting over the land rights. For certain, they know that one of those dark magicians is Wyatt Earp, brother to the Deputy US Marshal, Virgil Earp.

Along the way, we experience Western life firsthand. Ironically, fire breaks out in one of the hotels while the town's mayor is away trying to purchase a fire wagon for the town. The mining company is fighting folks with claims in town (including Mildred Benjamin) so they can acquire more space. As an aside note, President Garfield is assassinated. News comes via the telegraph--not the 'up close and personal' media of the television.

There's a mystery woven tightly into this fantasy landscape. Characters are well-written and the descriptions literally take you there--to the point of tasting smoke and dirt when the fire first breaks out. The story's spin is one that's not commonly told--and an interesting one. "Territory" is hard to put down, but I found myself doing that and re-reading a bit earlier than I'd left the book because I actually did want to make this one last. This is one of the best fantasy novels I have read in a long time.

"Territory" is not the first fantasy depiction of Tombstone, AZ during the OK Corral era. "Spectre of the Gun" (an original "Star Trek" episode) had Captain Kirk and his landing party inadvertantly cast in the role of the Clantons and McCourys.

History purists: "Territory" doesn't quite match the historical accounts; however, we all know that history is written by the victors. Clanton (who survived the OK Corral unsuccessfully tried to prosecute Wyatt Earp and companions for murder. There are two sides to the story and Bull's version definitely paints Earp with a dark brush.

I first discovered Emma Bull shortly after her fantasy novel, War for the Oaks, was released in the 1980s. In WftO, the protagonist was a rock-and-roll musician (not the then-common folk/earth mother) who is unwittingly brought into a war between opposing forces (both fairie). I've read that book so many times that I can recite whole passages from it.

Emma Bull's Territory is set in the months before the famous "shootout at OK Corral." In this novel, the two protagonists are unwittingly caught in the crossfire between two opposing forces -- the Earps and those who want to wrest away their control over the mining boomtown. As in WftO, the characters are people who don't quite accept the roles society expects for them: a young widow who's a typesetter at the newspaper and a horse tamer with an unacknowledged magical gift.

And it is absolutely marvelous.

Emma Bull is a brilliant storyteller who simply does everything right. She creates characters who, after only a few pages, you believe are real, and whose fate you care about desperately. The setting captures the climate, in both the weather and political senses; you're brought into a world of social proprieties, in which people are loathe to call friends by their first names, even during emergencies. The story... well, I'm rather blown away by Bull's ability to write around the "known facts" of the Tombstone era. Nor could I put the book down.

If you're a fantasy fan, you may fret a little bit about reading a "western." If you're a western or historical fan, you might be concerned about adding unrealistic-sounding fantasy to this story. Please don't worry: Bull's inclusion of fantasy and magic is simply one of the "issues" that her characters have to deal with, not Merlin charging in on a white steed, guns blazing, in an anachronistic manner. It works.

If you're looking for a novel into which you can fall head-first and escape your own mundane life for a few hours, please do pick up this book. Highly recommended.

I've never yet passed up an Emma Bull novel, and after this one, I'm glad I haven't. Ms. Bull has written fantasy here but it doesn't resemble any other of her books, but then she has never written the same type of book twice. I was almost to the end of the book before I fully realized what was happening, so subtly was the fantasy woven in. On the surface the book is about Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. The historical research is spot on--it's the fantasy that gives the whole story its twist. The historical characters are not who they seem to be. I read the book over the better part of two days and was disappointed that I had finished so quickly. I've heard that this is the first of two books--I only hope she gets the second one out soon. We haven't seen the alternative story of the gunfight at the OK Corral yet!