Ophelia's War: The Secret Story of a Mormon Turned Madam

“Alison McLennan does a nice job of bringing the reader into her chosen era. With seasoning, she could become a force in historical fiction.”

“Nature knows nothing of ladies and gentlemen . . . in the wilderness ladies and gentlemen would perish. Real men and women do whatever is necessary to survive.”

At 16, Ophelia Oatman is a survivor. At seven, she ate the cotton batting from her favorite doll when her Mormon family was starving on the trail to Zion (Utah). She survived the death of her mother and then the death of her father. Ophelia’s War: The Secret Story of a Mormon Turned Madam, a novel by Alison McLennan, takes flight when Ophelia is forced to survive one more loss: her beloved half-brother is driven out of town by an angry mob.

Ophelia has a secret, though. On her deathbed, Ophelia’s mother revealed that a priceless ruby necklace is hidden in Ophelia’s doll. Though it was a secret from Ophelia’s father, her slimy uncle turns up and demands his family’s treasure, and Ophelia must choose between her virtue and her future.

McLennan’s newest novel paints a vivid picture of the hardships of pioneer life in 1800s America: “Each day I walked beside the wagon until I collapsed from exhaustion. Then my brother, Ezekiel, carried me piggyback. When my small grimy fingers slipped from their clasp around his thin brown neck, he did not have the strength to hold me.” Ophelia relates the privation of her day-to-day life—animals and desperately needed gardens swept away by raging rivers, towns destroyed, lack of food—in a matter-of-fact way that makes the setting palpable.

McLennan has done a marvelous job of researching the era (though some anachronisms, such as someone making the “okay” hand gesture, slipped in) and the area. She sketches a narrative map of the Great Salt Lake Territory that makes it easy to keep track of her characters’ movements, while keeping the story from becoming pure travelogue. The soaring red cliffs and hard clay prairies of what would later become Utah are McLennan’s canvas, and integral to the trials and tribulations of her protagonist.

Ophelia herself is a believable 16 year old. Her life has made her tough, but she’s still prone to flights of fancy, particularly when it comes to young men. Each successive lover, chosen for looks more than character, is “the one,” and she’s in love immediately. Each betrayal comes as a shock to her, if not to the reader. As Ophelia ages (and this story takes place over nearly two decades) that shtick tests suspension of disbelief, but at first it makes her a sympathetic character.

Other characters in the novel aren’t always as well drawn. Uncle Luther is a villain out of melodrama, unctuous to Mormon elders while tormenting Ophelia at home; twisting his moustache while tying his niece to a train track wouldn’t be a surprise. Most other characters are placeholders and archetypes rather than complete, complex human beings.

Pearl, Ophelia’s madam (contrary to the novel’s title, Ophelia doesn’t rise to that station), is an exception, as is Charlie, Ophelia’s detective friend. These characters demonstrate both positive and negative characteristics, and have stories behind their actions. Charlie, in particular, has some of the novel’s best lines—it would have been nice if he’d been introduced earlier in the story.

The elephant in the metaphorical room is Ophelia’s Mormon faith. Though it looms large on the book jacket, it ends up being incidental to the story. Ophelia herself uses it on brief occasions to torment herself: Do murder and prostitution make her a bad saint? Does this man or that look enough like Joseph Smith (leader of the Mormon faith) to be trustworthy? It never really influences any of her decisions, however. Those looking for a story of “good Mormon gone bad” will be disappointed. Ophelia’s family was never fully observant of the faith, and there are no positive representations of Mormons to be found in the book.

For all her talent in painting accurate and enticing word pictures of her settings and characters and her knack for narrative description, McLennan struggles with believable dialogue. Proper names are used too often for natural speech, and characters have the unfortunate habit of starting a conversation using overly proper speech, dropping into dialect, then jumping back into pronouncements. People spend a lot of time “screaming” dialogue at each other. None of these are hallmarks of actual conversation.

Despite this tic, and the novel’s abrupt ending, Ophelia’s War is an interesting novel by a fresh young writer. Alison McLennan does a nice job of bringing the reader into her chosen era. With seasoning, she could become a force in historical fiction.