Death Comes for the Archbishopby Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop is on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list which I’ve set a goal of reading my way through. It’s about a priest setting off for what has recently become American territory in the New Mexico/Arizona area. The book follows him and his assistant through their careers in the desert working with Native Americans and former Mexicans.
It’s a very pretty book with a lot of word pictures – short but colorful descriptions of the landscape and the people. I’m not normally a very visual reader so some of it was lost on me but even I had to stop and imagine the settings she painted.
While the book covers some of the day to day details of running a church – they hold mass and say prayers and such – there’s really no religious philosophizing and the priests are surprisingly tolerant of any Native American sprituality they come across. It’s more a story of what the priests saw and who they met and what the territory was like in those days for a relatively civilized newcomer.
I can’t say I agree with putting this on the 100 Best list. It was a pleasant read but didn’t seem to have much point. The characters were agreeable but not particularly well defined and there wasn’t any conflict in the book. Here are two priests from France who seem to be completely at home in the desert: comfortable with privation and able to get along with any person or beast of any race or religion and speaking any language they might happen to meet. You’d think it would’ve been harder than that to be a priest in New Mexico in that time.
It’s even mentioned that prior priests have been massacred or run out from time to time. I might have chosen to write about them, as the ones she chose to write about seem to have lived relatively uneventful lives. But I guess she’s a poet at heart and it does have a kind of poetry to it – not just the evocative descriptions but an overall feel of sunshine and open air.
Overall rating: 6 out of 10, not a top 100er