Beyond the Horizon

February 15, 2015
Ireland finds no heroes in his debut novel, which blends fanciful history with magic realism to create a critical allegory of the American expansionist experience. Three primary characters roam the tale, all nameless, all symbolic rather than fully realized. One's a boy raised aboard various vessels by an illiterate sailor. Shipwrecked, father and son wash up somewhere on America's shores. The man's killed; the young man-freed of his father's dominance-heads west in a mule-drawn wagon. The man homesteads on the great western prairie, a place of welcome solitude. "He wondered how long it might be before this place he traversed became infected with people." A nomad band passes, leaving behind a pregnant young woman. She becomes a promise of something the man's never had-home, family. A mysterious stranger arrives and tells the man he must go register the family for a census. After the man sets off, the stranger kills the pregnant woman. As the man treks across the mountains, pursued by the stranger, all that transpires shifts and shuttles through time-from Anasazi settlements to shopping malls to the Dust Bowl and back to Custer and Jackson, Pizarro and Cortes. Amid cannibalism, genocide, slave labor and other horrors, allegories abound: the man as a seeker of idyllic pastoral life and the stranger as the ravenous industrial future; or the man as peaceful aboriginal people and the stranger as invading whites, who believe "the ancient formula of progress...needed casualties....Death is progress." Intellectual in theme, literary in execution: think Gabriel Garcia Marquez reimagining Little Big Man.

April 1, 2015

On the vast plains of the American West, an unnamed man lives with a pregnant woman who is not his wife. A strange visitor encourages the gullible man to go to a faraway fort to register the woman and her child with the census. The man travels through rugged terrain on this fool's errand, only to be hunted and haunted throughout the novel by the stranger, who had killed the woman. The story of the two characters becomes a creation myth for the American West in which the stranger plays God, building and violently destroying civilizations. The pair move forward and backward in time in dreamlike snippets, encountering life on the plains before their births and catching glimpses of the future. VERDICT Ireland's intensely and brutally violent debut novel sweeps through period and place while exploring the role memory plays in the establishment of creation myths. Recommended only for readers of literary fiction who can stomach a barbaric vision of the West. [Regional tour.]--Emily Hamstra, Univ. of Michigan Libs., Ann Arbor

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