Warlock - Oakley Hall / TRP

[Bekah]

Has anyone else read Warlock by Oakley Hall  - first published in 1958,  the 1965 edition has a review by Pynchon.  It's now available from New York Review of Books Classics - (has been since 2005 but yours truly has missed it! ). 

I'm currently about 2/3 finished -  excellent,  excellent book - wow,  omg,  yes!    It's like reading a good old fashioned western movie with some mind-boggling political/social/morality issues thrown in - including a miner's strike and whose law is it?   Hall asks who are the good guys and what are they made of?  Who are the bad guys and why?   What makes a hero and an enemy?   It's about loyalty and humanity and a whole lot of gun-slinging.    Nice writing - impeccably well organized and structured -  many many perfect characterizations including a couple of single women who are either Madonna or whore  - the sweet and beautiful nurse or the dressed in black with hook-nose w/bitch  and I don't know where the heart of gold is.    

This is fast paced and intense - it's wants to be a page-turner,  but because I really have to pay attention it's not a quick read - just seriously compelling.   (How do I say that this may be one of the best books I've ever read?)   

Basically this is the same general story as Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral.  The names have been changed,  events rearranged,  and most everyone is deranged. (Even Ned Buntline  of the Colt Buntline Special gets a un-named plug.)   Politics is mean and ugly and powered by money,  loyalty, hate, hero worship -  and that's  even before we get to any "law" being made or broken.     It's  like Blood Meridian only 40 years and a Civil War later  - maybe some AtD sprinkled in.  The truth is though - McCarthy and Pynchon were likely inspired by Hall - so we got some Warlock sprinkled into Blood Meridian and maybe into AtD  (think the Traverse kids and the miners in Colorado).    


This is Pynchon's review - found in lots of on-line places including: 
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_gift.html


The Gift
Holiday, vol. 38, #6; December 1965, pp. 164-5
A Review of Oakley Hall's Warlock

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. 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. 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. 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.
-- By Thomas Pynchon

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Bekah