the first of the great westerns

Finished The Last of the Mohicans today. Despite Cooper’s vain attempts at matching the flowery prose of his British contemporaries, and the implicit racism of the whole story, I very much enjoyed what turned out to be a rip-roaring adventure.

A younger contemporary of Sir Walter Scott, Cooper was just starting out on his writing career when Scott published Ivanhoe in 1820. In 1826's The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper portrayed the American frontier as every bit as romantic as medieval England. This is in part due to the depth of knowledge he brings to descriptions of an untamed upstate New York, the craft of hunting, accounts of actual battles of the French-Indian War, and even, colored as it is by an unwavering racism, the practices of the Delaware and Huron. This milieu is more exotic than 12th-Century England, yet closer-to-home for Cooper's largely American audience. It may not be historically accurate, but to one like me who doesn’t know better, it’s convincing.

The narrative is rough around the edges, with one-too-many reversals of fortune, speech that is occasionally overwrought, and characters who are, with the possible exception of Hawkeye, stereotypes, and who perform feats that would surpass even the ingenuity of the Myth Busters to reproduce. And yet, while lost in the novel, I cared about the characters; I triumphed in their triumphs, and shed a tear for their losses. I sighed at the beauty of the unspoiled forests of North America, felt a chill witnessing the harsh justice of the frontier, and was entranced by the tragic ceremonies of the Delawares. If one can get past the occasional lapses into Victorian frippery, Mohicans reads like the best of Hollywood screenplays, and it must be due to Daniel Day-Lewis’ stellar performance in its last adaptation that we have not seen a more recent big-screen presentation. What’s Clive Owen up to these days?