Death Comes For the Archbishop - Willa Cather

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TITLE: Death Comes For the Archbishop

RATING: **

AUTHOR: Willa Cather

PUBLISHER: Virago Press Ltd. (2006)

LENGTH: 320 pp.

AVAILABILITY: 6 GBP from Amazon

BOOK ISBN: #1844083725

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INTRODUCTION
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...my previous reviews know, I have been taking my final college courses required to get my Bachelor’s Degree, which I should be getting in December. I’m taking six online courses this summer, one of them being “The Novel in America Since 1914” which is an upper level English class at the University of Maryland. I’ll be honest with you all in that I very much prefer British literature than American, and thus some of my favorite books are “A Tale of ... more

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TITLE: Death Comes For the Archbishop

RATING: **

AUTHOR: Willa Cather

PUBLISHER: Virago Press Ltd. (2006)

LENGTH: 320 pp.

AVAILABILITY: 6 GBP from Amazon

BOOK ISBN: #1844083725

******************************************************************
INTRODUCTION
******************************************************************

As many of you have been reading my previous reviews know, I have been taking my final college courses required to get my Bachelor’s Degree, which I should be getting in December. I’m taking six online courses this summer, one of them being “The Novel in America Since 1914” which is an upper level English class at the University of Maryland. I’ll be honest with you all in that I very much prefer British literature than American, and thus some of my favorite books are “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “A Room of One’s Own.” This will be my final English course for my major, and I’m very much looking forward to just getting it done; plus, there really is very little I have to do for the class: read/discuss eight books, write two long essays, and do a final exam. The very first novel I had to read for this class is “Death Comes For the Archbishop,” which was written by Willa Cather.

Cather was born in 1873, near Winchester, Virginia (which is only 2 hours north of where I live) and ten years later, her family moved to Nebraska, the flattest state in the Midwestern U.S. After graduating from college, she went to Pennsylvania to became a high school teacher and, in 1903, she published a collection of poems (“April Twilights”) and later came her first novel, “Alexander’s Bridge,” which influenced her to quit teaching and devote her life to writing. Cather wrote 12 novels during her lifetime, with her most famous ones being “O Pioneers!” and “My Antonia;” in 1923, she won a Pulitzer Prize for writing “One of Ours.” The book that I will be reviewing today is “Death Comes For the Archbishop,” which was Cather’s final novel; it apparently was such a massive success when it was released in 1927, so much so that booksellers struggled to keep it on the bookshelves and, as a result, Cather made so much profit that she never wrote again another novel. I must say that reading the book 80 years after its initial publication, I don’t see at all what the big fuss was about.

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GETTING LOST IN THE DESERT
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The book begins in 1851, and primarily follows two French priests named Father LaTour and Father Valient who have been sent as Apostolic Vicars (members of a parish) to the territory which would later be named New Mexico. Bear in mind that this is in the time of slavery, constant Indian battles and the Mexican immigrants having some control over the Southwest. Father LaTour is determined to become the Archbishop of the territory and goes on a series of missions to spread God’s love across the land and meet different people and their situations; what he discovers is a land which is while under American law, it is actually governed by the cultures and customs of the Indians. The novel is not that long, though it does mostly cover 10 years in the lives of the two priests and their experiences.

Cather was inspired to write the novel by a Belgian priest that she met when she was vacationing down in New Mexico, and that much of the book is based on local legends and Indian stories; Father Latour was actually based on a real-life priest named Father Machebeuf, who also served as a missionary in the 1850s. Much of Cather’s research was on many letters in which Machebeuf wrote to his family in France while living in the Southwest. Cather certainly brings a sense of history to “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” with comments on the strained relations between the Americans and Indians, the rich and the poor, the expansive colonization, as well as how priests lived during the time.

I didn’t hate Cather’s novel, though attempting to read it was quite an ordeal. I found the whole novel really hard to swallow and believe me when I say I love classic literature, yet I rarely ever had had a major disconnect with something I’m reading unless it’s terribly uninteresting to me and this book was no exception. You know what I don’t think I’ve ever had this much difficulty reading a classic novel ever since I attempted to read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man,” over nine years ago in high school. When I first started reading “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” I got so frustrated by page 50 that I threw the book across the room (and believe me, I NEVER do that); in fact, I even paralleled Father LaTour because in the first few chapters he is literally lost in the desert trying to get to Albuquerque. So, a few days later, I managed to get through the entire book; the first help didn’t help me in appreciating the book so I read it a SECOND time and it started to get more into focus so that I can make a satisfactory response for the class.

I think the major problem in terms of Cather’s story is that the first 2/3 of the book are so uneven in terms of events and characterization; we know very little about the two priests, and thus we also don’t seem to understand their interests and feelings as they are travelling around meeting people. It wasn’t until Chapter 6 in which the two priests help out a widow in which Cather injects some humor where the book started to pick up; in the next chapter we actually get to learn some background about Fathers Latour and Valient, and the novel then gets a little easier to get through until the end. Much of what happens in Chapters 1-5 is mostly their interactions with the Hispanics and Indians, and there are also long, drawn out passages in which Cather talks about the landscape and environment.

The best thing I did like about the “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” was Cather’s description of the landscape, which is occasionally symbolic. Now, I must say that I’ve also been to New Mexico, so much of what Cather describes I can identify with driving long hours at a time in the desert with dunes, hills and cactuses. As the book starts, we see Father LaTour lost in the desert attempting to get to Santa Fe; he views the country as being featureless, as well as “crowded of features,” a contradiction, to be sure. This example in good in showing how Cather manages to create parallels between the landscape and what the characters are thinking; Father LaTour believes in the grace of God so much that he is sure he was on he right path, even though he and his horse haven’t had water in over a day and have been wandering.

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FINAL THOUGHTS
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Many of the critics and teachers who praise this book say that it breaks tradition in terms of storytelling and I don’t mind that but for some reason, this book didn’t work with me, despite the fact Cather’s lovely landscape descriptions, like “this mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and an incompleteness to it as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being thought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made a landscape.” Even Cather’s attempt at allegory is wasted, because of drawing on Biblical suggestions (not images) from the New Testament as well as The Seven Deadly Sins; they just are not fleshed out enough to really see any connection.

Personally, all in all, I thought this book was as flat as Nebraska, and I don’t recommend it to you unless the themes or “story” interests you at all. I’ve read a lot of classic literature, and I’ve liked most of it, though I found “Death Comes for the Archbishop” to be quite a disappointment; my next book is Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” so I’m hoping that one is a lot better. If you are interested in reading Cather’s novel, it is available for 6 GBP from Amazon; thank you for reading, and have a good weekend! Chris :)

P.S. Just to give you one more idea how much this book confused me, at one point Father LaTour is disgruntled to hear a young boy playing a banjo, and doesn’t really give a specific reason why; I was thinking, has he seen DELIVERANCE too many times or something? 

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