That a good chunk of the novel is dictated by Lurie to his camel, Burke, isn’t the most outlandish thing about it. Hi Jolly (AKA Hadji Ali), a Turk of Syrian descent who was one of the first camel drivers employed by the army, is among an array of figures who lived in the factual past but are reanimated by their interaction with the fictional Lurie. The spark of the best historical fiction comes when the imagined world collides with the real here, Obreht trawls up the fascinating history of the US camel corps, a short-lived attempt by the military to employ camels in the arid reaches of the south-west. Lurie is orphaned young and apprenticed to a graverobber. Lurie, Obreht’s hero, was born the son of an immigrant: Hadziosman Djuric of Mostar. If the western is the tale that America tells about itself, then this is an attempt to write a new chapter in that story. The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself. His story is intercut with that of Nora Lark, an Arizona farm wife in the early 1890s whose husband has disappeared in search of water. He’s sought by a dogged lawman and flees across the (not yet) United States of the mid-19th century. He falls in with a rough crowd and becomes a thief, then a murderer.
Lurie Mattie is an orphan forced to fend for himself in dangerous times – the wild west. Six years later, her second novel appears at first a wholly different proposition.
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