Warlock (was Re: "But the world isn't like that"

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy
I read Warlock this summer. It's a good book. I've a quibble or two
with this review.

>     Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock (Viking) has 
>     restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, 
>     blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into 
>     a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his 
>     blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, 
>     believes he is a hero. 

Blaisdell never buys into his picture as a hero. He knows what he is,
and what is about, first to last. It is the good foax who think him
heroic. And writers who think him good copy. His sidekick the gambler
buys into his own image as a bad guy, feeds the image, and in the end
to embraces it.


>	 He is summoned to the embattled 
>     town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens 
>     expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, 
>     live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, 
>     but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that 
>     have allowed the image to exist. 

Blaisedell states the course of the town's future disillusionment with
him flat out in a twon meeting at the beginning of the book. Events go
as predicted, with the exception that "love" enters the picture and
distorts it, aligning Blaisdell in part at least with an embryonic
labor movement. it is the labor vs. capital subplot which makes the
book interesting and important. This subplot is eliminated in the Henry
Fonda film.

It is Blaisdell's private 
>     abyss, and not too different from the town's public one. 
>     Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with-- the 
>     rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the
>     struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, 
>     mob violence, the personal crises of those in power-- the 
>     collective awareness that is 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. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that 
>     makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are 
>     a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy 
>     wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and 
>     drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us 
>     how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us,
>     has to fall.

It's a good book, as I said. Not "Pynchonian", but a good book. It will
never be worth a "group read" IMO.

mark


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