I have yet to read a bad Louis L’Amour book. Some of them are more forgettable than others, but they’re all at least pretty good. The best ones, though, are in a league of their own, and I think Last of the Breed may be his best work.
It’s a Cold War thriller about an American Indian pilot who gets shot down in the arctic and falls prisoner to the Soviets, who plan to interrogate and kill him. But he escapes from their secret prison and embarks on an epic journey across the Siberian wastes, following the path that his ancient ancestors walked when they crossed the Bering Strait and settled in the Americas.
Westerns are typically about the taming and settling of the land: characters who leave the comforts of civilization behind to build a home and make a future for their children and their children’s children. In this way, though the characters themselves are often fleeing civilization for one reason or another, civilization follows in their wake.
But Last of the Breed inverts this trope, so that instead of the hero taming the land, the land actually makes him wild. Instead of looking to his posterity, he looks to his ancestors and becomes the sort of man who is deserving of the heritage they gave him. In an era of globalization, when the world has been explored and the last frontier has been settled, this is the story of a man who returns to his primal roots and surprises himself by what he finds there.
Of course, this being a Cold War thriller, there is no shortage of man vs. man conflicts either. In fact, it’s the human conflicts that make the man vs. nature conflict so compelling. Except for the most remote and unlivable regions of the Siberian wilderness, everywhere the hero goes he encounters other humans, such as miners, trappers, or bandits, whom he must either evade or form temporary alliances with, in order to stay one step ahead of his Soviet pursuers. And of course, the most dangerous man who hunts him is himself a man of the wild, a Siberian Yakut to the hero’s American Sioux.
It’s an incredibly gripping adventure, with a laconic ending that’s just about perfect. I do believe this is Louis L’Amour at his best, not just in terms of prose and writing, but in terms of theme as well. Highly recommended.
Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour
Here is the kind of authentically detailed epic novel that has become Louis L’Amour’s hallmark. It is the compelling story of US Air Force major Joe Mack, a man born out of time. When his experimental aircraft is forced down in Russia and he escapes a Soviet prison camp, he must call upon the ancient skills of his Indian forebears to survive the vast Siberian wilderness.
Only one route lies open to Mack: the path of his ancestors, overland to the Bering Strait and across the sea to America. But in pursuit is a legendary tracker, the Yakut native Alekhin, who knows every square foot of the icy frontier - and who knows that to trap his quarry he must think like a Sioux.
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