(bal) (ATTN: Book editors)

(bal) (ATTN: Book editors)
"The Wandering Hill," by Larry McMurtry (Simon & amp; Schuster, $26,
320 pp.)
Fuson, a former Sun reporter, now works at The Des Moines Register.
Reviewed by Ken Fuson
Special to The Baltimore Sun
When we last left the Berrybenders, an eccentric, selfish and clueless family of English aristocrats bumbling their way across the American West in the 1880s, they had left their steamer, Rocky Mount, stuck in the ice near the Knife River. They were fish out of water, and the water was frozen solid.
In this, the second of Larry McMurtry's four-part saga, the Berrybenders and their entourage have landed at a trading post near the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, where they will try to survive the winter, the various American Indian tribes and each other. When Lord Berrybender, the drunkard patriarch, accidentally stabs his son's eye out with a fork at dinner (he was aiming for a Jesuit priest) you quickly realize the odds are stacked against them.
As with "Sin Killer," part 1 of the Berrybender tetralogy, "The Wandering Hill" is stocked with so many characters, some new, some (such as Kit Carson) based on historical figures, that you need a scorecard to keep track of them all. McMurtry graciously supplies one, although it's clear in the first five paragraphs, in which 12 characters return or are introduced, that the author expects his readers to keep up.
That's not as difficult as it seems. For a book in which so much happens -- a buffalo stampede, random Indian attacks, the births of three children, for starters -- the pace lags surprisingly at times, as McMurtry tackles one theme after another, from the destruction wrought by the white explorers, to the traditions and cultures of different Indian tribes, to the relationship, such as it was in 1883, between men and women. Misogyny rules.
The biggest problem in "The Wandering Hill" concerns the love story that stands at the core of McMurtry's narrative -- that between Jim Snow, a righteous frontier cowboy whom the Indians have dubbed Sin Killer, and Tasmin Berrybender, the fast-talking descendant of English nobility who married Snow and is pregnant with his child.
Tasmin would like Jim to open up, express his feelings, show some emotion. Jim responds by belting her in the face and fleeing their tent. He wishes she would shut up and act more like his two Indian wives. Jim is confused. Tasmin is confused. It's Venus vs. Mars on the high prairie.
But it doesn't wash. As McMurtry established in the first novel, the independent Tasmin fears no one, scouring every man present with her stinging tongue. She doesn't seem the type to let a man slug her, leave her alone and then welcome him back when he returns, no matter how taken she is with him. By the time she gains her revenge on Jim, it feels much too late.
For that matter, why would the Berrybenders, these rich English aristocrats, put up with all this torment that McMurtry throws at them? Their motive for sticking with this American journey -- other than Lord Berrybender's desire to shoot everything (and sometimes everyone) in sight -- is never satisfactorily explained. If they are as well off as we're led to believe, wouldn't they all have jumped on the first boat home?
McMurtry's storytelling skills, wit and research have earned him high and deserved praise, but he's trying to do so much here -- it's a history lesson, it's a love story, it's an audacious romp, it's a brutal documentary of the American West, it's a comedy, it's a tragedy -- that he's in danger of losing control of the reins. We know where the Berrybender clan is headed in part 3, but we may have forgotten why we should care.
Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service