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Téa Obreht’s novels teem with conflicting narratives, treacherous landscapes and speculative fictions. Her 2010 prizewinning debut, The Tiger’s Wife, examined themes of death, miracles and outsider status in the midst of a fictional Balkan war. Her fourth novel, Sunrise, returns to a western frontier haunted by ghosts and stalked by outlaws, a territory Obreht first explored in her second book, Inland.
It is August 2024. Nina Terzic has just jumped – or was she pushed? – from a crash-landing Cessna into a lake somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming. She manages to swim to shore. There is no sign of her boyfriend Ben, who was in the plane with her, and her phone – though miraculously intact – has no signal. Nina, a postgraduate student, was supposed to be on holiday from her job as a live-in nanny in New York. We get the feeling that her relationship with Ben might have a darker underside.
Nina quickly realises that she has happened upon a ghost town, one of the dozens of abandoned mining settlements scattered across the Old West. Exploring her surroundings further, she discovers the body of a woman hidden in a cellar. Beside the dead woman is a backpack containing a manuscript.
The sequence that follows is a part of that manuscript. Its action takes place in 1902, in the mountain town of Sunrise – the ghost town as it was, before everyone left. A man named Anton Vargas has returned after a long absence. He carries with him an aura of celebrity – or is it notoriety? Only Fred Kipley, the town’s deputy, seems unsurprised to see him again. Kipley and Vargas were once involved in a shootout with local bandits. Their courageous actions saved lives and cast them as heroes; in the years since, their exploits have become the stuff of dime-store novels and wild west shows. But Vargas is not a well man, and he has business to settle in town before it is too late.
The novel’s central section moves us a century forward to 2003. Sunrise is now a ghost town, the haunt of tourists. We meet Colin Yard, whose re-enactments of the Vargas story have become a valued source of income. Coll is greatly invested not only in Vargas’s story but in himself as the rightful guardian of that story. When he is contacted by a writer, Louise Hawley, asking if he will read the novel she has written about Vargas, Coll doesn’t pay her much attention. But Louise has her own deep-rooted connection with the place, and has discovered new information about Sunrise’s local hero that casts his story in a radically different light.
Coll is furious at what he sees as her trespass: “We have this small thing, you know?… This tiny part of history that belongs to us. And I don’t want it to be fucked with or misinterpreted by someone who, frankly, doesn’t understand it or care about it.” Louise is adamant that the material she has unearthed deserves to be scrutinised. She argues that Coll himself has altered material facts to fit his re-enactments, that recorded history is by its nature partly fictitious. But for Coll, “his” Vargas is the only Vargas. How far will he be willing to go to protect his property?
It is in this section that the novel’s themes and intertwined relationships come most persuasively to life. To Louise, Coll’s home town seems idyllic, the kind of place where neighbours are as good as family. But the situation is more fraught than surface impressions might suggest. Coll has recently had a disturbing altercation with the local bad boy, Bob Fournier. “Bob’s latest madness” is considered an outrage, yet no one has it in them to go up against him. Coll’s tacit condoning of Fournier’s actions has terrible consequences – not least for himself – but it is symptomatic also of a moral cowardice that will indirectly precipitate a greater calamity.
Obreht’s portrayal of Colin Yard – his gradual, desperate slide from favoured son to villain of the piece – is a brilliant piece of theatre. Coll’s attempt to control the narrative is echoed in the bullying paternalism of John Daisy, the villain of Louise’s novel, a rich landowner and stockman whose “big house” casts its shadow over Sunrise back in 1902. Daisy is an avid collector of Native American artefacts and a supposed authority on Native traditions – too bad if his patronage does not extend to living people. Throughout all three of her interwoven timelines, Obreht raises similarly searching questions about courage and cowardice, idealism and pragmatism, and most of all about how history is recounted and who gets to own it.
The novel does have its flaws. While the eventual revelations about Nina’s relationship with the ghastly Ben feel devastatingly real, it is difficult to ignore the loopholes in logic that characterise Nina’s portions of the narrative: how is she able to fall from a height on to water without getting injured? Having survived the crash unscathed, why does she waste time – and phone charge – trying to text her mother when she should be looking for a signal and calling 911? None of this detracts from the fact that Sunrise is an engrossing, original and thought-provoking novel, effortlessly readable and beautifully told. Given that most of what we come to know about Vargas is itself a series of fictions, it perhaps makes better sense to frame Nina’s miraculous survival as similarly mythic.
