Warlock - Oakley Hall / TRP

[Charles Albert]

For the P-list reaction to WARLOCK, I suggest you go into the archives....

I read probably half a dozen Hall's, none of which quite measured up. The
Corpus of Joe Bailey was interesting, as were the others in the trilogy of
which WARLOCK is part.....Separations was quite good. I think The Adelita
was probably his second best work...

love,
cfa

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 8:09 PM, Rich Clavey <antizoyd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
>
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