Warlock

Like Lonesome Dove and Deadwood, Warlock takes the western genre and refuses all the cliches, creating the possibility of actually understanding history in the terms of men, women, their frailties, and the power of the land. It goes beneath the obvious surfaces, reweaves actual history, and adds a level of writing expertise that makes it an American classic along the lines of what Hawthorne does to the Gothic in The Scarlet Letter. I couldn't put it down. In it, you see the roots of McMurtry's work and Deadwood, and even intersections with John Ford. For those who love the Western, you must read it. For those, like Pynchon, who want to groove on characters, sentences and a fictional world made vivid and compelling, check it out. A wonderful, satisfying and heartbreaking read.

Page 408 of Warlock contains the following: "Men are like corn growing. The sun burns them up and the rain washes them out and the winter freezes them, and the cavalry tramps them down, but somehow they keep growing. And none of it matters a damn so long as the whisky holds out." I don't usually read books that talk about whisky and cavalry, but this one was really good. Although a lot of the writing is like the quote above, the plot is a fairly sophisticated examination of the practical complexities of human morality. At first glance, the two main characters seem to be from the wild west boilerplate, one good guy and one bad guy. But the good and the bad are close friends, and they actually identify with each other qutie a bit. There's also an ugly guy who turns out to be the closest thing the book has to a hero. In contrast to the standard cowboy-movie theme, the characters struggle with the difficulties of figuring out what it would even mean to be good, bad, or ugly in a place that has no real laws and exists permanently on the brink of extinction. Apparently the book was made into a movie, but I would bet that it didn't translate well.

NYRB remains one of the few companies I will buy books from directly instead of used online- and that's because they put out titles like this. Anyone looking for the core text of shows like Deadwood, Rome, even the Sopranos, need look no further than Oakley Hall's imaginative way with the character driven plot and then, lo and behold, you realize everyone's cribbing from Hall! Ok, of course not point by point, but this book is a masterpiece of interlaced action and rumination, except the rumination slowly goes off course, becomes too self assured, and ultimately reveals said ruminator's short comings when compared with what's happening on the ground and the actual facts of the mattter. And all of this intentionaly done! And done for no other purpose than to please and entertain the reader! Oakley Hall loves you and he loves America! Stick with this book. If it at first it seems too epistolary, have faith, it hardens, it becomes concrete and third person. And yes it is even stupidly moving, in the best tradition of the Americas, and it will make you want to be a better person, while at the same time revealing what a chump you are for even worrying about yourself, when your fellow man stands apart in need. Special note, I have no idea what Robert Stone's intro really has to do with the book itself or really anything, but it sounds like something a Dog Soldiers character would have come up with so that's kind of neat.

I was googling for info on the interesting and enigmatic Thomas Pynchon recently, when I came to find out that this book I had never heard of: "Warlock" by Oakley Hall was one of his all-time favorites. As luck would have it, I found an e-bay auction about to expire with a first edition hardcover copy of the title and snapped it up as quickly as I could. The surprises which come from a sense of adventure in book choices are one of the great pleasures of my life. I have now read this book and can say in all honesty that it was one of the most powerfully told, beautifully rendered, exquisitely crafted books to land on my lap in my recent reading life. The fact that it's a "Western" put me off before I started, but that feeling flew out the saloon doors instantly upon meeting the book's intriguing cast of characters, people who are forced to face their fondest hopes and most terrifying fears in their struggle for justice and a peaceful future for the town of Warlock. My highest recommendation.

Warlock was an enormous genre-stretch for me, someone who doesn't usually go in for Westerns at all, generally sticking to horror and science fiction on the popular end of the literature scale; and with ummm... modernist and po-mo novels and poetry on the non-popular end. In fact, it was my favorite author, Thomas Pynchon, mentioning "Warlock" as an influence and college favorite in his preface to Richard Farina's "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me," who led me to read it. That said, I have to add this is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding books I've read in a long time. In particular, I thought the plotting and pacing were superb; after finishing a section one is surprised by how many pages have gone by in description of--so it seems--such basic action, but the pages turn easily and quickly with no sense of padding. The writing itself is confident and understated, believably pitched, seemingly unmannered; and for me the dialogue had just the right balance between plain English and "dadburned" Westernisms, going lightly on the latter. The characters appear in sharp focus and maintain appropriate perspective. (Though an important subtext throughout concerns the pressures between real men and their deeds, and their images as heroes and characters of legends and fiction.) Underneath it you have the existential Western bass line a reviewer above mentions, a handful of pessimistic figures having to do with the nature of justice and human relationships, above which are rung 450+ pages of changes. The stark, hot, dusty, minimalist, claustrophobic setting almost reminds me of Beckett; and there's more than a bit of that author's permutational exhaustion at work here, as a handful of (static or only slowly evolving) characters interact like the rolls of dice from a gambler's hand. Pynchon, in a tiny essay on the book, says that Warlock "...must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can." Highly recommended.