It took me ages to actually get invested into “Riders of the Purple Sage”, but I’m glad that I stuck through to the end. It’s a thrilling tale, filled with a ton of action and romance. I’ve seen many people comment on the romance, saying that’s the primary genre and not it being a western, but I’d say that the two go hand in hand here. The basic story is a romance, but it’s most definitely a western in every sense of the word. Grey’s writing style took a while to get into; it’s easy to read, but it’s a bit bulky and clunky at times. Despite that, he was able to craft some captivating characters, along with creating some landscapes that I now will have burned into my memory. I really enjoyed this novel, I just had to take a lot of time to find my footing with the novel.

Grey's 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage is probably a prime example of what I would expect from a Western: horse riders, gunfights, funny accents, and romantic notions of masculinity recovered from working a hostile landscape into hospitable condition. Grey's West is a world inhabited by larger-than-life characters whose fates are intricately connected by melodramatic twists and whose landscapes seem to exist somewhere between reality and the painter's vision.

Riders is a romance, though, in a more classical sense. Grey cannot help himself from expressing his admiration for the West, and his romantic notions seep into every bit of his prose. From sweeping plains of purple sage to hidden paradises tucked in the canyons of Utah, Grey juxtaposes the idyllic West with the vicissitudes of human vice, associating virtue with virginal land and vice with unnatural human politicking.

The politicking in question pertains to the corruptive elements of the Mormon faith, and Grey is fairly unapologetic here: he deliberately points out that, while Mormonism may be a true and just faith to some, human will to power will always corrupt institutions of power, and thus his Mormon characters are unscrupulous villains hell-bent on the consumption of both land and man. Through Jane Withersteen, Grey's protagonist, the author dives into what separates a good Mormon from a bad one, and through Lassiter, Jane's romantic interest, Grey shows that a virtuous Gentile can often be more just than a corrupt Mormon--and that religion, in the case of Mormonism, is just another tool the corrupt use in their lust for power and privilege.

Human politics aside, Grey also imbibes his story with melodrama and romance, such that his novel feels less like a rootin', tootin', cowboy shootin' novel of gunslinging action than it does rustic romance. For Grey, his women are distinctly feminine, his men distinctly and ruggedly masculine (when they're the heroes, of course), and they're inevitably drawn to each other such that they each can only accentuate the gendered performances of the other. This is probably the one aspect that has aged most poorly in the novel, although Grey does find some ways to subvert these expectations on occasion. This is by no means a transgressive novel, but Grey does at least make an attempt to inspect the ways in which our social situations can reflect on our own gender performances.

What I loved about the book is its prose (even if he overuses words like "purple" and "sage" and "purple sage" and "riders" and "riders of the purple sage"), its themes, its philosophical questions about religion and our duty to it, and its action. What I didn't like was the constant romanticism, or its absolutely god-awful dialogue (Fay, the child, being the absolute fucking worst).

Nevertheless, it's easy to see why this book is a classic. I think Grey deserves his accolades, if using this book were to serve as the sole representation of his ability. It's far from a perfect book, but it connects where it needs to. I think it's a worthy read.

Revisiting this book--I know I read it either for a class or for pleasure while I was in college (20+ years ago), and I really really liked it, but I remembered nothing.

I am so impressed at the riveting, fast-paced action sequences. I finally get it: Westerns are the original action movies! Overall this story was also more focused on women than I ever imagined, too, and I had zero memory of it being about the tension between Mormons and "gentiles." Definitely still liked it though!

Not really sure about this one. It is an old western, so I expect much of the dialog and horse riding, and with it a certain amount of 'romance', be it for the land, for the frontier itself, and between man and woman.

What I did not expect was for every chapter to reference the SAGE - Oh, my, how the sage is in each and every chapter. And it is never doing anything except being purple, reminding us of the title of the book.

Also, I know that this is an old novel, but I Despise the use of the word 'ejaculated' instead of exclaimed or shouted or even said excitedly. This book 'ejaculated' a few times to my recollection.

The part the leaves me in the state of unease is, the ending just ends. One minute there is a chase scene into the mountains and then - end. Abrupt and not very satisfying. I will say that this is not a great book, though a classic, one that will not remain in my collection.

Riders of the Purple Sage is often cited as the first traditional Western. The issue with this is that instead of ageing gracefully, one would expect that it would seem, ironically, cliched to the modern reader. The fact that it would have invented those cliched conventions is only of historic interest, it does not change the experience for the modern reader.

Interesting enough, it would appear that few Western tropes appear in the novel. If there is some generic plotting, it is due more to the conventions of escapist literature and not that of Westerns.

So, what does it have? It has the capable gunslinger in the form of Lassiter. It has damsels in distress. It has cattle rustlers, a town ruled by corrupt leaders that make their own laws, and Western scenery. And not one of these elements (well, except for the scenery) are used in what we would deem as the typical Western way. The damsels are as capable as they can be, the gunslinger very rarely gunslings, the cattle rustlers are...well, almost incidental, and the corrupt leaders are Mormon polygamists.

Oh, there's also a revenge storyline that involves the gunslinger, but it hardly seems all-consuming to the plot. It functions more as a means of showing the development of the character.

The storylines are simple. Nothing complicated here (though a bit convoluted) and the two stories are told through the viewpoints of Jane and Venters. Jane's story is the one advertised on the synopsis. She has inherited quit a bit of riches from her father and wants to remain independent for a bit when Tull proposes marriage to her. As a result, Tull uses his position in the Mormon hierarchy of Cottonwoods to put pressure on Jane's financial well-being in order to reign her in. At that point, Lassiter the infamous slayer of Mormons shows up to help Jane out.

Interesting enough, this plot seems almost secondary to the story of Venters. This is a much simpler story, Venters is a non-Mormon that hung out with Jane and was run out of town be a jealous Tull. Wondering in the wilderness, he has some experiences where he discovers that he does not have to be alone and finds love, etc. Someone looking for a book about Jane's storyline will be shocked to fine that over half of the novel is about Venters in the plains of sage.

Which gets to the actual main character of all Westerns: the scenery. And boy howdy is there a lot of it. I am under the impression that at the beginning of the 20th century, when this book was written, travel was not nearly as possible for the vast majority of Americans. To them, books not only acted as an escape to another time, but also allowed them to visit different places they might not otherwise see. So we get lots of descriptions of the plains of purple sage, canyons, passes, valleys, ranches, the weather of the west, and even some Anasazi ruins. And this is where the novel really shines. This is where the best writing is, the scenery does not exist for the plot, the plot is an excuse to show off the scenery.

I found this to be an unexpected pleasant read. Mostly because for having the basic components of a traditional Western, it does not follow the tropes. Here, we can see that other writers and film makers took aspects of the novel that they liked and expanded on those aspects.

And what about the controversy? Some of the bad guys are Mormons. Get over it.

Basically the worst. Ever. Best characters turned out to be the silent burros and the horses.

Tough to get through. The story itself was classic Western fare but for my money there was far too much time spent on describing the landscape ad nauseam. With the exception of Lassiter, there was little in the way of character development. Jane Withersteen was awful. Am I mad I wasted time reading it? Not really. Am I glad it is over? Yep.