The Eagle and the Raven

 

The Eagle and the Raven – by James Michener

This one was probably an accountant’s move.  Before I say anything else, please make sure you don’t pay full price for this thing.  I bought it used for $1.00.   It was an o.k. purchase for $1.00.  Had I spent any more than that, I probably would have felt gypped.  Michener himself states in the forward of this book, that this “novel” was a rejected chapter from his behemoth book “Texas”. For whatever reason, that chapter has now been resurrected into its own book.  Apparently, he did something similar with his novel “Journey”.  THAT one was excised from the larger work “Alaska”.  I haven’t read “Journey” yet, but after reading this one, I can sincerely say that such endeavors aren’t really worthy of one’s time.

I mentioned that this book has a Foreword.  It also has several appendices, lots of illustrations (rough sketches, nothing serious), a color supplement featuring drawings of the two protagonists as well as the author (why?), big print, and lots of space between several of the pages.  So whatever the page length is, you can probably hack off a good 25-30% of those page numbers since so much of what is here is basically superfluous. It’s never a good thing when a book has this much padding.

In fact, the Forward is the most interesting thing about the book.  In this introductory section, Michener talks about how the book came to be, but he also talks about several of his (really long but good) novels that he wrote in his 70s and 80s.  Given his advanced age, this was quite the accomplishment.  One wishes he would have kept writing about his escapades as a septuagenarian author, and not actually diverted his focus to this supposed “novel”.

In fact, this really isn’t a novel. This is more of a dual biography of Santa Anna and Sam Houston; the  two foes who would eventually face off in the battle of San Jacinto after the infamous slaughter at the Alamo.  This was a very big part of the history of Texas, but Michener never actually told straight history in his novels.  He would use real people and places as background, and they may make a fictitious cameo, but had this “chapter” been left in the Texas novel, it would have been radically out of place since this is essentially straight history.

Now, the dual biography here isn’t poorly written. In fact it’s quite good. It just seems rather unnecessary.  The seriously curious would obviously look elsewhere since this is rather abridged. In fact, this might have been a good primer for a student in high school or junior high school if some of the verbiage wasn’t so R rated (lots of sex, violence, and sex and violence).  The chapters essentially alternate focus between Santa Anna (the “Eagle”) and Houston (the “Raven”). To be honest, I didn’t see many similarities between the “Eagle” and the “Raven”, so the contrasts and comparisons the author alleges seem nothing more than a silly exercise.  Sure, we learn some things about each individual, but I never saw the need to juxtapose the two.

A fair read I guess, but one would hope that these type offerings would be rare and the novice reader won’t make a mistake of shelling out hard earned cash for something so minimal.