The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Caballeros del sabio púrpura

There's this federal law enforcement officer and his posse, which includes the officer’s roguish but good-hearted cousin as jovial side-kick, sent into the mountains to bring the benefits of white men’s justice to the natives of the region. There's this evil, scheming bigot who is in league with the big local land owner, both of whom for their own reasons want the natives blamed for murder and highway robbery. There's this beautiful young widow who is the object of lust and greed who, along with her trusted natives, need protection. Sound familiar?

What’s the inverse of a Spaghetti Western? Perhaps this book in which the frontier-plot that has been hashed out in dozens of films and countless television series is projected back from 19th century Texas to 16th century Spain. The hero is the honest representative of the King, but hardly differs from your average federal marshal. The bigot is a Dominican inquisitor rather than an arrogant white settler or Baptist Minister. The land owner an Aragonese noble rather than a mere land-baron. And the natives are Moriscos, that is Muslims who have been coerced into adopting Christianity (so-called New Christians), who substitute rather seamlessly for the Cheyennes of the Apaches in tales of the old American West.

The hero is of course thrown into a political tangle of which he is largely unaware, regardless of how apparent the situation is to any reader who has even heard of Zane Grey (Indeed The Riders of the Purple Sage could well be the crib for this book). Just as obvious is the source of the criminality in the local noble family which uses suspicion of the Moriscos to further their plan to acquire both the widow and her ‘spread’. There is no real moral content. As in any Western, Good and Evil are not difficult to distinguish from the start; the question is never what rightness might consist in but by what combination of fortune and true blue integrity will prevail when the mettle of the hero has been tested. The sub-plots of love affairs, hidden parentage and institutional corruption are equally banal and predictable.

The cultural and political background of 16th century Spain – which along with travel description of the Spanish countryside is spread liberally throughout the book - is mildly interesting but hardly worth the price of admission in terms of the time necessarily invested in 400 pages. One is perhaps surprised at the persistence of Moorish culture so long after the Muslim expulsion, or the prevelance of the culture and the Morisco population in Northern Aragon, right up to the Pyrenees, well into the late 16th century. But such things, for the amateur, would be much more easily gleaned from a quick consultation of Wikipedia.

There must be a reason why this sort of backwards-projection historical novel gets written, published, and read. Perhaps the sheer predictability of the story and its characters is comforting or reassuring. In any case, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly probably has greater literary merit.

View all my reviews