Lando - A Short Review

For the first time, I felt like L’Amour allowed his main character, Orlando Sackett, to fail. Unlike all previous Sacketts, Lando suffered from a lack of connection to his parents, his mother having died when he was young and his father abandoning him to be cared for by an evil man. He ran away from his guardian and lived alone in his parents’ cabin on a Tennessee mountainside, but he hadn’t benefited from the training in woodcraft and combat that other Sacketts had received from their fathers. Sure, he was still self-reliant and skilled due simply to surviving the wilderness alone.

The second great difference is that Lando was captured by crooked Mexican outlaws/police in his efforts to recover his share of a sunken treasure off the coast of that country. He suffered years of abuse and torture, though he never broke. Even so, unlike Orrin or Tyrel, his distant cousins, he would never be a ladies’ man or a successful leader of men. Lando became a sort of fighting brute.

In the end, Lando was successful in getting revenge on those who had crossed him and sent him into the dark hole of torment. But, unlike the other Sackett novels, that is all the redemption or blessing the reader gets from this novel. Sure, Lando works hard, but his is always made to – it isn’t an ethic that we can uphold as pure and for emulation.

As a book, the differences were somewhat refreshing to me. It gets old to see the characters always luck into perfect situations and never suffer from their mistakes or those of others.