Oh lor', when the literary blurbs, and this has a lot of literary blurbs, tell you what an hilarious piece of literature you are about to read, then seriously consider ripping out those pages and pages of literary blurbs and making paper aeroplanes out of them and sending them flying to Antarctica. Sin Killer is funny, make no mistake, but, as is often the case with certain types of literary comedy, it's the sort of humour that involves somewhat grotesque characters slipping on banana peels and injuring themselves horribly and dying a long slow painful death crying pitifully for their mothers so that you come to hate yourself for ever having laughed at them in the first place.

Death stalks the American West of Larry McMurtry in many and varied forms, from sheer accident to Indians, slavers, weather and geography, plucking at the fringes of the party of the appalling Lord Berrybender, over from England to shoot lots of things, drinking claret and pleasuring himself on his mistress and either neglecting appallingly or verbally abusing his varied offspring. Elder daughter, Tasmin, spirited and spoiled, has a chance encounter on the banks of the Missouri Rover with the fierce but taciturn young trapper Sin Killer, leading to a tempestuous union where physical desire overmatches any sense of personal compatibility. As the Berrybenders and entourage voyage up the river, Tasmin and Sin Killer's relationship is the centrepiece around which swirls comings and goings, conflicts and fights, blunders and captures, torments and murders; and you know by the time you get to the end that there must be more books to come because, somehow, there are still plenty of characters left to kill.

It is brilliant, though. Nobody demytholigises the West like McMurtry, and this comic tragedy of the aristocracy of old Europe clashing with the democratic chaos of the Western Frontier, an advance party of the civilised despoilation of the great wilderness, leaves no myth standing. Arguably, of course, he replaces it with potentially enduring myths of his own, but whether these myths are closer to the truth, as if such a thing were knowable, is hard to say. Great to read, though.