Epitaph
It's not lying. It's telling a good story.
Following her previous novel about Doc Holliday meeting Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Mary Doria Russell decided to tackle the gun fight at the OK Corral. Epitaph isn't exactly a sequel to Doc. It has the same characters, sure, and reading the first one will give you a better understanding of Doc Holliday and his relationship with Wyatt Earp, as portrayed by Russell. But this is a separate story entirely.
While the story ends up focusing mostly on Wyatt Earp, Russell goes to great lengths to humanize everyone involved in the gun fight. As such, scenes are occasionally rewound to be shown from another perspective. Motives are occasionally given after the fact, but they're always given. Unless, of course, the historic record remained completely silent.
Everyone had an opinion about this near-mythical gunfight and the fallout from it. There are countless contradictory accounts, and Russell did her best to sort through them all, to be fair to everyone, and to paint as accurate a picture as possible. While also telling a compelling story.
And that story is compelling. Maybe that's just my latent love of westerns talking, but Russell manages to both romanticize and deconstruct to romanticization of the Old West. There are cowboys and outlaws and lawmen. Saloons and pool halls. Life is hard, impossible at times, but the story remains mythic in some ways.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I loved this book. I loved the slow rambling way it went about establishing the facts, as well as it could. I loved the care Russell took with the women in the Earps' lives. I loved that no one was presented as a complete villain, except possibly Old Man Clanton. They're all just people, trying to make a life for themselves, some more honorably than others.
But this is also the story of how Wyatt Earp learned to lie, learned to drink, learned to hate. His fall into vengeance and debauchery seems like the biggest tragedy of all. There were no heroes in the Old West. Life was too hard, to harsh and cruel. It chewed them up and spat them out, no better than the people they were trying to stop.
Following her previous novel about Doc Holliday meeting Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Mary Doria Russell decided to tackle the gun fight at the OK Corral. Epitaph isn't exactly a sequel to Doc. It has the same characters, sure, and reading the first one will give you a better understanding of Doc Holliday and his relationship with Wyatt Earp, as portrayed by Russell. But this is a separate story entirely.
While the story ends up focusing mostly on Wyatt Earp, Russell goes to great lengths to humanize everyone involved in the gun fight. As such, scenes are occasionally rewound to be shown from another perspective. Motives are occasionally given after the fact, but they're always given. Unless, of course, the historic record remained completely silent.
Everyone had an opinion about this near-mythical gunfight and the fallout from it. There are countless contradictory accounts, and Russell did her best to sort through them all, to be fair to everyone, and to paint as accurate a picture as possible. While also telling a compelling story.
And that story is compelling. Maybe that's just my latent love of westerns talking, but Russell manages to both romanticize and deconstruct to romanticization of the Old West. There are cowboys and outlaws and lawmen. Saloons and pool halls. Life is hard, impossible at times, but the story remains mythic in some ways.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I loved this book. I loved the slow rambling way it went about establishing the facts, as well as it could. I loved the care Russell took with the women in the Earps' lives. I loved that no one was presented as a complete villain, except possibly Old Man Clanton. They're all just people, trying to make a life for themselves, some more honorably than others.
But this is also the story of how Wyatt Earp learned to lie, learned to drink, learned to hate. His fall into vengeance and debauchery seems like the biggest tragedy of all. There were no heroes in the Old West. Life was too hard, to harsh and cruel. It chewed them up and spat them out, no better than the people they were trying to stop.
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