Woe to Live on

They made a movie out of this book. It's called Ride with the Devil. It's okay. Not nearly as good as the book. Like in Eudora Welty's stories, it's not the plot that moves you, but the way the story is told. That's the case with this book. So if you've just seen the movie, you've missed the best part of the piece--the author's voice.

Great book. Great film. BTW; The book is still available under the title "Ride With The Devil."

Finally and at last, the border war of Missouri/Kansas is having its story told. Here were no magnificent lines of battle with brave banners and an awe-struck foe admiring the fatal advance. Here were no bugle calls, no gold braid uniforms or gentleman officers in plumed hats. This was a dirty, vicious, strange-dogs-in-a-meathouse fight that shattered families, emptied neighborhoods, and sometimes created feuds that lasted generations after the war.Daniel Woodrell writes with a remarkable style perfectly suited to the tale he tells. Taut, sparse, haunting, lyrical yet terrible, easing us lazily along from moments of unpretentious poetry to drop us jangling into stark, slamming violence. From the first page, I read it as drinking a rare liquor, sipping and savoring only a few pages a day, in no hurry to have it end.Mr. Woodrell does not rub our faces in gore, but nor does he shrink from or glorify the brutality of killing. We have no doubt of what is happening, recoil from its horror, yet the image is drawn with such spare, severe strokes that we are left stunned as the aftermath of a car wreck - what just happened? When one character dies, the scene is engraved with a laser beam; "Oh, sweet Lord Jesus. It was way down there past terrible....My world bled to death."Yet rather than being a story about a war and its battles, this a story about very young men - and women - whose lives are turned inside-out by that war. We see them involved in the very human struggle for place, for a sense of belonging, for those fleeting moments of gentleness, set against the smouldering, bloody backdrop of war, and jerked back to the bad-chili burning in the guts for payback when "comrades" are lost.Rather than merely a war story, it is in part a love story, love of friend for friend, a man for a woman. There is no drippy sentimentality, no saccharine examinations of emotion. The same pen that strokes murder in sharp black lines etches with exquisite delicacy the gentler moments.The reader may initially find the Victorian dialogue a bit awkard, but in only moments, there seems no other way the story could have been told. Nor do I feel that any other writer could have told this tale so well, save this native son of the Ozark country.Told through the eyes of young Jake Roedel, who accepts what he sees with no idealism and only later any question, I recommend this book with a whole heart. Most especially I recommend it to those with an interest in the Missouri/Kansas conflict, or any part of the less-defined, personal aspects of the Civil War. For story, characterizations, marvelous use of language, and a haunting quality that lingers long after the last page is turned, I give it a solid five stars.

I love to read history of any sort but I'm not particularly interested in the American Civil War or the "border wars" that accompanied it. Having said this, I could hardly put this book down. Woodrell writes as easily as a canary sings and is as evocative in his language as a Sunday preacher. Some readers may reel from the sheer volume of casual violence in this book but, after all, that is what it was like during this period of time and wishing it didn't happen doesn't make it go away. Remarkably, I didn't find the story line particularly significant and the ending won't make you gulp; it is the individual people, not the events --- not even the gangs --- that take center stage. I found that character development and the use of language set in the tapestry of the times the most engaging aspects of this remarkable book.

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!" 16 year old Jake and his friends may not be able to quote the bard, but these teenage hardcases know too much about havoc. You can get a dollars worth of bitterness for only a nickel hereabouts. The war in Kansas and Missouri that raged for years before and after the 'War of North Aggression' left a lot of scars on this edge of the prairie. There weren't a lot of major battles, nothing you had to learn about in school. Just a neverending campaign of mutual retaliation. Casual hangings, work-a-day shooting sprees, ordinary assassinations, mundane decapitations. Even a not-so-ordinary arson where the yankee's burned a warehouse full of captured Southern women in Kansas City. Oops! You know, your ordinary border war. Ho-hum stuff. Payback for payback, ad nauseum. 20 years of Guerilla warfare waged mainly by teenage boys in cowboy hats. Make 'em wear ballcaps backwards while chanting YO and flashing gang signs, and it could be your town, today. In case you didn't think a border war between a couple of bland midwestern states had any relevance to your life...wise up, pilgrim. Read Woe to Live On, you might spot some of those mistakes History professors were always warning you to learn from, or be doomed to repeat. You know, like "Lather, rinse, repeat." This is good stuff, Woodrell is a master at dialect, and his grasp of the underlying hopelessness of this conflict rings true. I advise you to read it before the movie gets here. Get it the way Woodrell meant it, before some scriptwriter tries to make you believe this mess was all about slavery. Yeah, slavery drew a line in the sand between "Freestate" Kansas and "Secesh" Missouri. But how 'bout those poor neutral immigrant rascals standing on the wrong side of that silly line when a batch of masked riders rides up? Not everyone had a dog in the fight, but guess what? Once the payback starts, there isn't a lot of time for sorting out believers from nonbelievers. Ho Hum. Tie him to that wagonwheel, set the wagon on fire, lets ride into town, I hear they got a real purty gal working at the dry goods store. That attitude makes for a real unhealthy environment, maybe this is the sort of thing your professor wanted you to clue in on. This war out here wasn't about noble causes. There weren't many thin grey clad lines valiently crashing into blue clad hordes. We just had a lot of victims, lots of 'em hanging til they turned icky green. Blue and Grey means less than live or dead. I got one request. Next time this country decides to settle a noble cause by choosing straws and flailing away at itself...y'all go do it somewhere else. This border is closed for repairs.

When a friend recommended this novel to me, about a year ago, I didn't have very high expectations. I thought that it would be a very sensational and sappy story like so many war novels that never quite capture the true grittiness and tragedy of war. But I was really blown away by this effort that is honest, powerful, and captivating with its brisk prose and developed characters. Definitely worth picking up!