Warlock

Warlock is a rare book: a novel whose Western setting couldn't be further from the drawing rooms of England, but what George Eliot did for Middlemarch, Hall does for Warlock— a New Mexico (maybe) mining town that owes a lot to Tombstone, Arizona. To find a modern work that might compare to this, you have to look to another medium: David Milch's cable series Deadwood — to which this book served as an obvious inspiration. But the book, as is usually the case, is richer.

To be sure, the book requires a bit of work for those (like me) whose attention span has been shortened and dulled by online media. There are many scenes that, although fully described, have a meaning that may not become clear until many pages later. Sometimes you read show more them and wonder what you're missing, when in truth, you haven't missed anything. On the other hand, sometimes a character says something that you don't quite get, and you're left to remember what that character happened to see or hear in a previous chapter in order to make sense of it. Adding to this, the idiom that many of the character speak, though authentic-seeming, doesn't always match the conventional movie-Western idiom we're used to. It adds to the sense of realism, but sometimes it leaves you scratching your head. What does it mean to crawfish? What exactly is the difference between a jack and a mucker? In short, reading Warlock requires a brain; it may be a Western, but it's no mere airport read.

I regret that this book is set in a (violent) man's world. Amidst a couple of dozen well drawn males, there are only two significant female characters: one weak and controlling, one strong but ineffectual. Even in a rough, frontier mining town, that half of the human race deserves more representation. That said, the major characters are deep and believable, even while they occupy stock roles: Johnny Gannon, the inwardly sensitive but outwardly stoic deputy, always underestimated; Clay Blaisedell, the Gary Cooper gunslinger who finds himself bending under the weight of the role of town Superman; Tom Morgan, the despicable killer-gambler who is nonetheless Blaisedell's only true friend, and many more.

In short, this book is to your typical Western as a Jane Austen novel is to Bridget Jones' Diary. Warlock presents an unsentimental mix of complex characters and lets their internal and external struggles throw light on issues of individual and social morality that are relevant in all places and eras, and never more so than today. Rich, long, and increasingly absorbing as you do the necessary work of paying attention, it's the first novel I've read in several years that made me want to return to the first page and start again. show less

Oakley Hall populates his novel Warlock with an entire townfull of characters, the way Charles Dickens does, or more apropos the way Pete Dexter did in his western Deadwood. While there is a central plot with its handful of major characters, Mr. Hall takes the time to bring each minor player to life, enough to fill his small Arizona town of Warlock with a memorable populace.

Like Pete Dexter's Deadwood, and the television series that was probably based on it, the main plotline of Warlock centers on a gunslinger attempting to go straight as the town marshall. Clay Blaisedell, who is loosely based on Wyatt Earp, is hired by a citizen's committee made up of the moneyed property holders of Warlock. They need someone to keep the locals in show more line and to prevent the nearby gang from further robberies and rustlings. But Blaisedell soon finds that the citizen's committee also wants him to keep people they deem undesireably out of town, even if those people haven't violated the law. After he is forced to fire upon men he laters finds innocent, he refuses to remain the town's marshall, stepping aside in favor of Deputy Gannon, another former gunslinger.

Blaisedell and Gannon are soon set on a course of conflict that will inevitably lead them to fight eachother as they try to maneuver between the citizen's committee that wants to control them and the townspeople who either worhsip them as heroes, fear them as villains or envy them as rival gunslingers. That both men want a peacefull town, won't help either of them in the end. Too many people have too many conflicting demands on them. I desperately want to tell you what happens in the final shootout, but I can't. I will say that it took me completely by surprise; it's unlike anything I've ever read before; I loved it and I so should have seen it coming.

Into this more-or-less typical scenarios, Mr. Hall introduces a cast of supporting characters centered around the local mine and the minors who attempt to form a union. The citizen's committee demands the sheriff drive the union agitators out of town, but he refuses as they have done no wrong in his eyes. This is but the first in a series of events that will culminate in a showdown between the minors and the army, brought in from the nearby territorial capital at the mine owner's request.

Warlock is an excellent novel for the way it explores the complexity of what is morally right in a place without law. The citizen's committee has no real legal standing--they are simply the ones with enough money to hire the best gunslinger. Blaisedell and Gannon both are as dirty as the outlaws they attempt to keep in control. They've just switched sides sooner. Gannon's brother fell to Blaisedell's gun just before he became deputy. That he did not seek 'justice' for his brother has put Gannon under suspicion as far as many in Warlock are concerned.

There is an element of romance for both Blaisedell and Gannon, though here the novel is arguably at its weakest. Blaisedell is in love with the "Angel of the Mines." A local woman who runs a boarding house for miner's that doubles as a hospital for them when needed. She functions as the woman on a pedastal much the way so many women did in 19th century fiction. Through the example of her goodness she hopes to redeem many of the men in town. Gannon is in love with a former prostitute who has come to town hoping to see Blaisedell gunned down at last. She cannot kill him herself, but she wants to know that the man who killed her brother has finally met his end. She is not above trying to manipulate Gannon into killing Blaisedell for her.

The two are such obvious Madonna/whore characters that many readers may find them trying. But if you can look at them not as stereotypes but as explorations of stereotypes, you'll find both have much to offer, both are fully developed characters, both speak to something profound, a desire for security or a desire for the sense of quietess justice might bring but never does. It's a tribute to Oakley Hall that what should be characterture become memorable characters.

Lots of people avoid westerns for reasons I don't really understand. Warlock is among the best I've read to date. If I still gave stars, I'd give it five out of five, maybe four and half. Butcher's Crossing is still my all-time favorite, but Warlock will hold certainly hold it's own. show less

In his introduction, [author:Oakley Hall|44545] said that "The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.' Although Warlock is a fictional story about a fictional town in a fictional state, it offers up more truth and insight into the events that happened in Tombstone, Arizona, than did any of the hundreds of so-called Factual accounts of those historical events.

What we know about the fictional town of Warlock is that it is a silver mining town situated near the border with Mexico. Outside of town live what are called cowboys by friends and rustlers by just about everyone else. The distinction appears to be that some don’t consider crossing the border to round up cattle belonging to Mexican rancheros as rustling, show more illegal, or even disreputable. Problems arise when these high-spirited cowboys go into town, get a snoot full, and start to act up (i.e.: shoot the barber for giving a bad cut, or the piano player for missing a note). As Warlock is unincorporated, there is no official court or law enforcement, so the town’s businessmen take it upon themselves to form a Citizens’ Committee which proceeds to hire a Marshal (aka skilled gunman) to restore order. Add to this a mine with its usual mix of nasty mine manager and unhappy miners and you pretty much get the picture.

What separates Warlock from other westerns with similar plots is that Hall uses it to carefully examine the subject of justice in general, and frontier justice in particular. There are few black hats in this story and no white hats at all. The so-called good guys all have their demons and the bad guys, for the most part, have their softer sides, if you probe long enough.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Thomas Pynchon, in his review, wrote that It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels.

Society, then and now, is a fragile thing. Per Pynchon, "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." show less

Like many, I bought this book after reading that Thomas Pynchon was a big fan of it, and he was absolutely right about it. His capsule review on the back of my edition has an astute emphasis on the unique role that the western novel/film has come to play in the American psyche: mementoes of the second, true Founding, where the country was clawed from the earth by the miners and gunfighters and criminals unable or unwilling to fit in anywhere else, blowing thin soap bubbles of civilization that would all too often pop and leave only death behind. If you've ever seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance you'll find a lot that's familiar here, in particular the parts about the economics of the frontier and the desperate struggles for survival show more that consumed many formerly prosperous towns: Warlock, like so many other boomtowns, is more Tombstone than Phoenix. Where Warlock really captivated me was in its treatment of the classic black hat/white hat battle between the hired sheriff, Clay Blaisedell, and his opponent Abe McQuown. The book is clearly aiming on some level to be partly a discussion on why people need heroes (the book's version of the shootout at the OK Corral is particularly explicit about this), so after finishing it you can easily spend hours thinking about what it really means when some Reagan/Bush-type character puts on a cowboy hat and starts talking about Law and Order or Wanted Dead or Alive, and why they feel compelled to do it in the first place. But this western isn't boring in the slightest; its themes of labor struggles, amorality, and myth-busting flow smoothly from the action and the characters, all of whom have their own special relationship to the town and each other. Deputy Johnny Gannon is particularly interesting. Warlock is one of the best and deepest westerns I've ever read; the writers of Deadwood probably have a few well-read copies of it. show less

Warlock is a microcosmic tale of man's obsession and struggle for power. The small, fictional South-Western town is the fulcrum on which the righteous and wicked vie to rule, the town's inhabitants perpetually caught in the crossfire.

Since Warlock is not deemed substantial enough to deserve its own county seat, and the nearest court being a day's ride away in Bright's City - the law of the land is somewhat hamstrung, amounting to a single jail in a ramshackle hut where the lengthening deputies' names scratched into the wall show the monotonous loss of life and cost of the power struggle.

In an attempt to take matters into their own hands, the inhabitants create a citizen's committee which decides to hire a cultish, golden gunned warden show more by the name of Clay Blaisedell, in order to gain their own standing in Warlock and kick back at the outlander band of troublemakers and their notorious leader, Abe McGowan.

The path of Oakley Hall's story is far from simple. Truth, morality and honour become convoluted and circumspect in the melting pot of power, righteousness a pinball ricocheting against the countless variables: wonts, desires and limitations of his dustbowl denizens.

“Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see—as I realize now the doctor saw before me—that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends be ever stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash one against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men’s hearts to false hopes forever?”

Hall pens the complexity of life expertly and the reader, like his characters, become embroiled in and sullied by his prose. Warlock is a highly crafted and memorable tale that is well worth a read. show less

The town of Warlock is terrorized by a group of rowdy cowboys, until a committee of town businessmen hire a marshal to keep the peace. The marshal declares that the cowboys aren't allowed in town, by punishment of death, which raises questions about who has the right to declare and enforce laws.

The book turns that question over and over. Some of the book is written in the form of journals of one of the businessmen on the town council, who asks himself repeatedly if he himself is guilty of murder if the marshal kills someone for entering the town. Meanwhile, one of the town's prominent businessmen is also a cheater and a murderer, but the law applies differently to him.

While this is an excellent examination of the moral ambiguity of show more frontier law, it is also an enjoyable Western, full of the expected cast of cowboys, deputies, and prostitutes and some very tense action scenes.

I listened to the audiobook, and although the narrator is very good, it's a confusing book to listen to because Hall has a habit of naming a character in the first sentence of a chapter, and then just saying "he" for the rest of the chapter, and if you don't catch the name the first time around, you're confused for the rest of the chapter about who this is. There are a lot of characters, and it's hard to keep them straight over audio. I probably missed a lot of nuance because I had trouble following the story. show less

Sharply, even beautifully, written. But as a whole did not cohere for me. The complex hatreds, loves, of Morgan, Dollar, Jessie, and Blaisedell were too self-serious, too maudlin. It all felt weighted down by thick layers of shellacking, despite the spare prose.