Inland, Téa Obreht

Some books you race through, enjoying the whole journey and missing it when it's done. Meanwhile, some books you read to the end because you're hoping it gets better or makes sense there. Set in 19th century America, Inland straddles the divide by alternating the narrative between a straightforward and well-told tale of frontier life, and a largely incoherent but intermittently fascinating parallel tale involving camels. In the former, a wife and mother is stuck waiting at home, slowly coming to the realisation that her husband and sons may not be returning, while steadily falling prey to ghosts from her past. In the latter, an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire falls in with the real-life United States Camel Corps in a trek across the West, largely traced out in conversations with the dromedary camel he befriends. In principle, the latter could have been great (and is, though only sporadically), but Obreht goes out of her way to make it incomprensible, with characters with multiple names, uncertainty about who's a camel and who's a human, and far (far) too much about ghosts. But while reading it, I largely overlooked this in the expectation that the two narratives would come together and make complete sense. They do, but they don't, and the novel ends on a downbeat note, where one narrative strand resolves clearly, the other rather unravels, and the whole is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. But there is great writing most of the way here, but it feels a little wasted by the author's commitment to incoherence (they might say "mystery"). I'd go as far to say that the book would work much better with the second strand entirely expurgated.