Holiday reading: Sandwiched between the ultra-lite new Paul Auster, Neil Gaiman’s re-imagining slightly flat reimagining of The Eternals and Francis Wheen’s entertaining, frustrating, infuriating and vague How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, I read Oakley Hall’s Warlock.

I’d never heard about the book but found it because the idiot/ wonderful* independent book shop in West Hampstead had misfiled it under Fantasy/Sci-Fi. It turns out it’s absolutely brilliant. Set in a fictional wild west town near the Mexican border around 1880 the authour deconstructs the common western tales, Tombstone, Billy the Kid etc. and reassembles them into a multi threaded epic dealing with issues of social control, notions of justice and the nature of legends. Kind of like Alan Moore’s idea of “solve et coagula”…

…where “solve” is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works — what in our modern terms would be called analysis. In a scientific framework, it would be called reductionism. The other part of the formula is “coagula,” which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.

I’d say that we’ve had an awful lot of “solve” in our culture, but far too little “coagula.” There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they’ll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture. Which is not to say that everybody is like that. You mentioned Thomas Pynchon earlier, and he would be one of my primary inspirations for that worldview. Reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” first alerted me to the fact that yes, you could work with this sort of complexity and richness.

In fact, Thomas Pynchon’s blurb on the back get to the heart of it better than I ever could…

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 has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . . 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. . . . 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.

I really want to like Pynchon’s novels but never seem to get hooked. I guess I need to wait for another holiday and then put some effort in. I’m back into the idea that reading ‘dificult’ books is worth the effort at the moment.

Note about the cover: I normally don’t like Sigmar Polke much but the cover here fits perfectly; the atrophied photostats of the gun men exploring “Notions of perception and the authenticity of images” reflecting the ideas about how stories aquire cruft and are changed over time to suit the tellers ends. I love these NYRB editions.

*The staff have an excellent selection of unusual books but have problems organising them, particularly annoying is the section “Science/Religion” where The Selfish Gene sits next to The Celestine Prophecy. Also, they have an excellent comics section (maybe it lack personality a bit, strictly canonical stuff).

I was in a Waterstones in Wimbledon a few weeks back and the had Joe Sacco’s Palestine in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section.

What infuriatingly bad bookshop organisation have you encountered recently?