HALLEY’S GATHERING is told on an enormous canvas. Over the course of its 750-odd pages, author Willliam Overstreet conjures an image of the American Southwest in the first decade of the twentieth century. It’s choked with dust, crisscrossed with fuddled frontier lives, and wrapped in hope for better times.
The year is 1910, and Halley’s Comet is about to become visible in the sky on one of its periodic visits to the inner Solar System. The protagonist, Julia—whose last name also happens to be Halley—runs a trading post in the New Mexico Territory, counting among her customers and friends surveyor Owen Rouse, doctor Harry Whitaker, and the Yazzies (the half-Navajo, half-Hopi brother and sister). For the most part, Overstreet wears his consciousness of the period lightly, letting it settle over the novel rather than allowing it to dominate: only once or twice—as when, for example, the narrative breaks off to inform the reader about the Navajo’s Long Walk—does the novel stray into bald exposition.
The period is far enough removed from the Old West to make the setting something liminal, firmly placing HALLEY’S GATHERING in the neo-Western genre. It is self-aware enough for its characters to dwell on the historicity of the people and places about them—Owen’s musings on the science fiction novels he has read depicting humankind’s future (works by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and the like) being a case in point. It is this very quality which elevates the play-on-words of the title to something more than a writerly conceit. Julia, like the comet with which she shares a name, is somewhere else; she and those in her orbit are seemingly without connection but are slowly becoming bound to the modern world. Talk of the wireless, the coming of electricity and the telephone, is woven into the book as a constant reminder of an age coming to an end. There will be repercussions that will both enhance and complicate the protagonists’ lives, peppered as they are with considerations of love, work, and meaning. Writers tend to devote themselves to writing either paeans or elegies to the West; Overstreet’s achievement is to have penned a novel that stands very well as both.
Written by William Overstreet, HALLEY’S GATHERING is a magisterial evocation of frontier life at a time of monumental change.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader