Appaloosa
Jose Canusy
Appaloosa
by Robert B. Parker, 2005
It's a novel written in the best tradition of
"old west" story telling with the traditional
plot involving good guys vs bad guys in a small
town somewhere "out west." Entertaining reading.
Russell Watson
wrote:
Some spoilers...
I recently bought this in hardback from the Barnes & Noble discount
table because I like Parker's Spenser and Jesse Stone novels and had
to see how he would handle horse shit and gunsmoke. While the basic
plot is indeed in the "ruthless cattle baron wants to rule the town"
mold of Louis Lamour, et.al., I thought it was much more realistic in
its portaryal of characters than the "traditional" western.
His portrayal of men with somewhat muddled codes of honor who could be
face of the law in one town and ride with outlaws (often their kin)
somewhere else rang true to what we know of such western icons as
Wyatt Earp, whose personal "code of honor" as a lawman seems to have
been dubious at best, "Wild Bill" Hickok whose days as a frontier
lawdog were interspersed with others spent as a drunken saloon
brawler, Bat Masterson whose only known killing of another man was in
a saloon brawl over the affections of a whore, etc. Throw in John
"King" Fisher and Ben Thompson and you have a pretty good rogue's
gallery of men who spent as much or more time seriously bending if not
outright breaking the law as they did behind their various badges. The
central character of the story, the iconic itinerant gunslinging town
tamer, reminds me a bit of "range detective" Tom Horn in his
ambivalence about having any sort of moral compunction regarding
taking human life. He's a guy who basically sees himself as a killer
who is good at it and that's his primary methodology for dealing with
problems. He comes into a town and kills the people who need killing
to make it a fit place to live, then drifts on just ahead of the
sudden moral outrage of the citiznes who hired him to do just that. We
get the impression that he is not man whose dreams are haunted by the
people he's killed. His sidekick, who narrates the story, isn't much
better. As somewhat dull-witted (due to not giving a damn more than
being dense) ex-soldier turned drifter, he's simply not quite as quick
about it.
Other than having a somewhat hastily contrived ending that feels
tacked on to the rest of the story when a requisite number or words or
pages were reached (which more and more authors of various stripes do
nowadays, to my chagrin) it is indeed a pretty decent read for fans of
the western genre.
Aubrey Phasmid
or an old time gunslinger
Russell Watson
Now they're making a movie of this due out in Oct. Starring Ed Harris
as Virgil Cole, Viggo Mortensen as Everett Hitch and Renee Zellweger
as Allie, none of which comes close to what I envisioned whilst
reading the novel. Typical...