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A novel about the Alamo promises as much suspense as a movie
about the Titanic: we already know how it's going to end.
The bloody siege of the Alamo was, of course, not only the
defining crisis in the Texan struggle for independence from
Mexico but also an event that secured martyrdom for the 200
or so men who died there and transformed a dusty Franciscan
mission into a national shrine, an American Troy. As with
all mythologized chronicles, however, the Battle of the Alamo
ultimately resolves into mundane fact, a catalog of human
error, ego, and heroism. And it is these details that Stephen
Harrigan regards in his broad and powerful third novel, The
Gates of the Alamo.
Passing lightly over the oft-profiled Alamo stalwarts -- Jim
Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the young commander William Travis
-- Harrigan focuses on fictional secondaries, primarily botanist
Edmund McGowan and mother and son Mary and Terrell Mott. Rigidly
devoted to his work, Edmund straddles the fence in the dispute
over Texas, even as war murmurs grow. But when he meets widowed
Mary, who maintains her small inn with a steady, gentle resourcefulness,
his good nature pulls him steadily into the inevitable conflict.
Mary herself is forced to quarter Mexican soldiers; and then,
as she watches incredulously, her young son seeks to test
himself in the erupting skirmishes. Eventually the trio find
themselves inside the Alamo during the nearly two-week battle,
their various conciliations frustrated by the surrounding
mayhem.
Harrigan's Texas is an uncertain, dangerous jostling of peoples,
a place where disaster threatens too frequently, where practical
knowledge is paramount and political ambivalence untenable,
and where a primal beauty appears often as if by magic: "Hundreds
and hundreds of lush gray cranes ... spanned the sky almost
from horizon to horizon, and the whole procession moved with
the quiet, ordained manner in which events unfold in a dream."
However, the emblematic significance of the Alamo itself remains
inscrutable. As Mary tends to the dying, watching hope turn
to hopelessness, she can only respond to Travis's rallying
orations with disillusionment: "She had heard enough of these
empty patriotic effusions by now to feel that the Alamo was
nothing but a sinking island of rhetoric." The Gates of the
Alamo nonetheless sweeps us into the many and variegated smaller
stories that compose the larger one. It's a book to remember.
--Ben Guterson
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