Inland by Téa Obreht review – an otherworldly vision of Arizona
Set during a drought, this spectacular follow-up to the award-winning The Tiger’s Wife reinvents the western
“There are wounds of time and there are wounds of person,” cautions a camel driver in the extraordinary second novel by Téa Obreht. “Sometimes people come through their wounds, but time does not. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes the wounds are so grievous, there’s no coming through them at all.” Obreht is superb at tracing such inescapable wounds, both personal and national. Her 2011 Orange prize-winning debut, The Tiger’s Wife, mapped the aftermath of civil conflict in an unnamed “Balkan country still scarred by war”, which was based on her native Serbia (born in Belgrade in 1985, Obreht moved to the US at the age of 12). The fictional territory of Inland is as vivid and as violent: Arizona in the second half of the 19th century, populated by “cowpokes and prospectors”, gunslingers and cattle kings – and, yes, cameleers.
Magic realism served Obreht well in her fable about Yugoslavia’s baroque divisions, and it’s no less effective in shaping this alternative foundation myth about the American west. On the face of it the book begins conventionally enough, with the story of an outlaw, Lurie, who is on the run. The twist lies in Obreht’s affinity for unusual transformations. Like her, Lurie comes to America from the Balkans, as an immigrant child called Djurić. His surname is swiftly anglicised and he has a brief career as a gang member before falling in with the US Camel Corps on its way from Texas to California. Here truth proves stranger than fiction. The Camel Corps was a short-lived experiment introducing the animals into the US army as beasts of burden, manned by drivers from the Ottoman empire. Billed by wanted posters as a “hirsute Levantine”, Lurie finds that his ambiguous ethnicity provides the perfect cover for a new life as an ersatz camel-riding Turk.