The Western Lands

It's sad that since his death, the star of William S. Burroughs has been fading. But when this book was first released, I was working as the night foreman in a municipal garage in Detroit. I spent haunted Saturday nights at my desk, near the emergency phone, reading "The Western Lands" and when a worker came into the office, I'd read aloud from it. After a while, other workers came in and listened. These man were white trash and those of the African persuasion. Some were hipsters, others were devout Christians. They could've been sleeping, they could've been goofing off, but they all seemed to understand what I was reading, and at certain passages the black guys would hoot and give each other "high fives." Who IS this guy? they asked. They (we) all hated English class and hated being force-fed "literature." This, however, was something else. I think poorly of literary critics, and it really matters little, in the long run, what their opinions are. What matters is that old Bill Lee wrote the obvious truth in such a way that it cut past the [horsefeathers].

The Western Lands has all the scatter-brained and scatological charm that any of WSB's finest portrays, but not only is this particular story, the third installment of the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, form at its best, the content transcends anything else he's written. In his old age, WSB had an incredible emotional sadness about him, and this novel, which becomes semi-autobiographical at its end, leaves you profoundly touched in a way Naked Lunch never did and few novels ever can. The whole thing is worth reading if nothing else for the Wishing Box chapter at the work's conclusion.

This is definitely Burroughs's most powerful book since Naked Lunch, and perhaps my favorite after that. It's a wonderful journey through the lands of the dead, and offers a few clues into Burroughs' personal beliefs on the subject and how he feels death should be approached and life to be lived. Definitely read the first two novels in the trilogy first, though. Burroughs' books have always been less about narrative and more about painting a picture. This is a beautiful picture.

This is Burroughs in top form, summing up a fantastic voyage across the mental-scapes of the Death that constitutes Western Civilization, this is probably my favorite of all of Burroughs' novels.

The trilogy to which this lucid novel belongs marked a slowing down of pace for this writer who had become so renown for his soaring and shocking books. Yet, especially in Place of the Dead Roads and Western Lands, his vision sinks in far more deeply and the sheer beauty of its imagery is the light behind the doors of perception which his previous work has kicked in. Always someone who showed no mercy to those who wanted to hide from reality and whose words were like bullets, here in the final part Burroughs grabs you by the throat by talking to you in a unexpectedly human voice of a world beyond death and humanity. He always was a poet, but here he truly sings, be it a swan song.