Warlock - Oakley Hall / TRP

[Rich Clavey]

I read it a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it for all the reasons you gave. I just recently got a used copy of the NYRB edition (with it's great cover). Will have to read it again... Are any of his other books as good as Warlock?
Rich



--- On Thu, 2/21/13, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Warlock - Oakley Hall / TRP
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013, 6:11 PM
> 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
> 
> ***
> Bekah
> 
>