BookBrowse Reviews Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke

BookBrowse:

Drawing upon actual historical figures, this action-packed novel is sure to delight fans of adventures set in the Wild West.

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After exploring the urban grime of New York City in his previous novels, Shannon Burke's latest, Into the Savage Country, is the account of William Wyeth, a young man who on the outs with his father, decides to prove himself by seeking fame and fortune in the American frontier. A classic Western set in the 1820s, the novel is filled with buffalo hunts, encounters with Native Americans and rival British trappers, and plenty of fightin' and killin' and dyin' – just exactly what you'd expect from a book about the first forays into the American West.

I found the book to be a fun, fast-paced read, chock full of action-adventure sequences that kept me riveted. Yet the author keeps the characters and their exploits from becoming overly predictable or stereotypical, making this one of the more entertaining entries into the genre in recent years. Wyeth and his companions are well-drawn and multi-faceted, and Burke's writing really brings them to life.

The quality of the prose sets this novel apart from so many others in the Western category. Burke is immensely talented at portraying nail-biting hunting and battle scenes, as well as painting a detailed picture of the environment in which the hero finds himself:

Ferris stopped. He'd heard something. We both turned to the south where a large buffalo, up to its belly in snow, lumbered out of the pine forest. The great beast plowed forward then stopped suddenly. It had scented us. It stopped and snorted. Slowly Ferris reached for his gun, but the ice on his robe cracked sharply when he moved and the bull bolted. In an instant Ferris and I were up on our horses, dashing through a heavy winter snow, up and down through the channels in the lowlands and out onto a windswept patch of ice that was a shallow branch of the Missouri.

The author bases several of his minor characters on people who were active trappers during the 1820s — William Ashley, Jedediah Smith (see 'Beyond the Book') and Jim Bridger (although Burke freely admits that his book isn't historically accurate and that these men couldn't possibly have been in the area portrayed during the book's purported time period.) I found this to be a double-edged sword: On the one hand, knowing that these bit-players weren't just invented characters – that they truly did live and die in the Old West - added a layer of enjoyment to my reading; on the other, I objected to Burke's appropriation of these real-life heroes' adventures, assigning them instead to his protagonists. (For example, at one point Wyeth and his party head off to scout in Mexico and are arrested by the authorities — a story that neatly parallels one of Jedediah Smith's exploits.) It seemed to both rob people who should be honored of their glory and to lack originality.

Although overall Burke's writing is stellar, every now and then he repeats one word or phrase several times over just a few paragraphs (in one instance he uses the word "savage" to refer to the country five times over six pages). It's not clear if this is a stylistic choice, but I for one found it tiresome; fortunately he slips into this pattern only very early on, and then again briefly toward the end. I also wish the book had been fleshed out a bit; there's almost no description of the day-to-day hardships the men endured (their entire six-week journey to one base camp is relayed in half a sentence); given the author's abundant talent for description, it's a bit disappointing that he chose to concentrate on just the action sequences.

In spite of these minor flaws, it's not hard to imagine Into the Savage Country garnering the author many new fans. Given its fast pace and cinematic nature, it's sure to appeal to those looking for an action-packed historical fiction novel of the Old West.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2015, and has been updated for the February 2016 edition. Click here to go to this issue.