Zane Grey - Riders of the Purple Sage

[orlok]

Originally Posted by hartsfieldl1

I'd love to join the discussion. I sometimes teach this in a course called "Literature of the Southwest," and it can lead to some fascinating discussions. I'm going to be traveling soon, but I'll be checking in.

Welcome . As a dabbler, I look forward to hearing a professional opinion on the book.

Reading these comments it amuses me that I found the book much like a romance novel, only with the 'bodice ripping' sexual aspects of romance novels replaced by raptures over western landscapes. As far as sex and romance goes it was incredibly chaste. I thought the characters were rather unrealistically simplistic at times. Take the climatic scene between Venters and that simp Elizabeth Earne. Paraphrasing in Elizabeth Earne's voice over a interval of moments:

“I love you and want to go away an marry you”
She hears Venters has killed the man she thought was her father.
“I can never marry you now, forget me.”
She hears that Oldrig was not her real father, instead that being a man she never knew.
“I love you and want to be with you forever.”

Not to mention the implausible connections revealed between them all. Something worthy of Dickens' Great Expectations.


The Mormon Church certainly was cast as the bad guy in this book. Then it really was unpopular back then for a lot of reasons. Why even far off in England Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the Mormon Church the bad guys in his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. The Mormons were regarded with suspicion, almost as a cult. There was also the polygamy issue that continued for a time even after the church formally renounced it in 1890. Then there was the Mountain Meadows massacre of an emigrant wagon train bound for California by a combination of Native Americans and a Mormon militia in 1857. (I just happen to up on some of the history of the Mormon Church from having just read The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff.)

I found the chance discovery of the “Garden of Eden” Valley an interesting aspect of the book. This is a quote from a book I have about the Anasazi Culture:

“On a bitterly cold December day in 1888, two cowboys chasing strays through the tangled canyons and mesas above the Mancos River in southwestern Colorado broke out along the rimrock to let their horses blow and get their bearings. . . . But even as they rested, a decisive draft draft pushed between the canyon walls, sweeping th falling snow before it, to reveal a stone house—no a whole series of stone houses—tucked back in a huge recess in the cliffs across from them.

. . .

What Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason found that December day was just one of many prehistoric Indian ruins that dot the Mesa Verde, all long abandoned. Their discovery was not the first sighting of a cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde, for as early as 1874 William H. Jackson, the famed photographer of the Hayden Survey, had photographed a ruin in Mancos Canyon. But Wetherill and Mason had found Cliff Palace, the glittering jewel of Mesa Verde, preserved and protected from the erosion of time by its cave.” from Anasazi – Ancient People of the Rock by David Muench and Donald Pike.

Zane Grey was almost certainly aware of this true story. I've always wanted to visit the 'Four Corners' are of the US to see these Anasazi ruins.

[issybird]

This could aptly have been titled The Writer of the Purple Prose. In common with those who have posted, I also was surprised at the overwritten descriptions of the scenery and the romantic histrionics. I thought it would be all riding and shooting, although there was a fair amount of that.

It reads like the high-romance novels of a hundred years ago so is obviously typical of its time. Is this what men liked to read? Did they sigh happily when the bold hero was overmastered by passion and grabbed the pure young girl in his strong arms and rained kisses on her blushing face?

It had a lot of surprises that didn't surprise at least the jaundiced 21st-century reader. Bess had to turn out to be the missing girl and been untainted by the touch of man, although Bern had nobly forgiven her. And who didn't know that the rock which had been poised over the pass for a thousand years would come crashing down?

I found the most modern aspect, oddly enough since it seems so un-PC, to be the depiction of what it's like to live in a theocracy. All law and relationships subject to the will of the religious leaders with no check on their actions; religious fanaticism continues to bedevil modern society. I suspect Grey's indictment of Mormonism in the late 18th-century was accurate enough, if one-sided. Interestingly to me, it seems to have been motivated by the excesses in his personal life. A married man, he lived polyamorously with several different women at the same time, even traveling with them. His wife accepted the situation. So it's hard to see his condemnation of Mormonism for its effects on the women as not reflecting a measure of guilt or overwhelming ego or perhaps both.

This was a fun read. It would have gone down more easily without the histrionics and the lush prose, but that's part of the period appeal. I didn't like it enough to make me seek out more Grey; just the same I admit to some curiosity about what happened to Lassiter and Jane. Maybe sometime I'll pick up the sequel.

[zespectre]

it amuses me that I found the book much like a romance novel, only with the 'bodice ripping' sexual aspects of romance novels replaced by raptures over western landscapes.

Hamlet53, I had been trying to figure out how to phrase this, you nailed it. Once I figured out that aspect of what was bugging me I was able to say "oh well, that's how it is" and relax a bit and enjoy the rest of the book.

Having traveled that area I enjoyed the descriptions and I found the book to be pleasant "light summer fare" overall. Much like the spaghetti western movies, sometimes you just want a fairly predictable formula so that you can just go ahead and cheer when the "hero" wins.

Perhaps I'm a little bloodthirsty but as a 21'st century person I got EXTREMELY annoyed that so much of the "payback" took place "offstage" as it were. I wanted classic showdowns and felt a little cheated to repeatedly "miss" the showdowns and have to hear about it "secondhand" after all the buildup.

[GA Russell]

This is free today.

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JDY7TL2
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ride...rey/1002106532
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...purple-sage-30

[crich70]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

This is free today.

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JDY7TL2
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ride...rey/1002106532
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...purple-sage-30

Also here at Mr as part of of the 1st vol. of a 2 volume collection of his works.
Epub

[crich70]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I suppose that it would be politically incorrect today to make the Mormons the bad guys. If I were a Mormon, I wouldn't be happy about it! A few months ago I read The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and noticed that its author Howard Pyle made the bishop the bad guy second only to the Sheriff of Nottingham, and had Robin Hood murdered by a nun, so I had to figure that Pyle was anti-Catholic. I'm a Catholic, and I'm accustomed to anti-Catholicism, so maybe the Mormons are accustomed to anti-Mormonism too.

I did think that Grey did a good job of tying up all the loose ends at the end of the book.

What say you?

Ah but in the case of Robin Hood the church and the rich nobles were the villains in the original stories I think. They had the $ and power and the poor serfs were little better than slaves after the Norman conquest of England. So Mr. Pyle may simply have been penning modern language versions of the original ballads which had the same villains opposite Robin Hood and his men.

[Apache]

The original sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage was The Rainbow Trail. If I remember correctly, around 2005 they reissued Zane Grey's original manuscript that had been heavily edited in 1915. The Desert Crucible is the original book as Zane Grey wrote it. I bought it last week, but have not started reading it yet. I want to reread Riders of the Purple Sage first.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Apache