Warlock

Начало книги

ONE YEAR in the early Sixties, shortly after I met my literary agent Candida Donadio for the first time, she gave me a novel to read. To my surprise it was a western, by Oakley Hall, a writer of whom I had heard good things. The last western I had read was a book of Zane Grey’s about hunting mountain lion somewhere around the Grand Canyon. I had no idea what I would think.

I remember thinking how wonderfully clear the book was. Not only clear, as I remember, but full of light. The sensation of reading back into time was very strong because the style made itself invisible as good style will when it is accomplishing its purpose.

Rereading Warlock I found again the light I remembered, an afternoon brightness, a clarity that is, I think now, the essence of good realism. In an almost literal way it illuminated the characters. When it focused on individual lives it seemed to vary its distance from each character as though there existed a different extension of sympathy or a withholding of it for different individuals in the narrative. The light I guess I had recognized the first time as western light. Big Sky light. Realism, I had thought at that time. This is good realism. And I became aware of the skill, the strategy of placing one line upon the other.

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