Woe to Live on

Rating:
Summary: The war without bugles and banners
Review: Finally and at last, the border war of Missouri/Kansas is having its story told. Here were no magnificent lines of battle with brave banners and an awe-struck foe admiring the fatal advance. Here were no bugle calls, no gold braid uniforms or gentleman officers in plumed hats. This was a dirty, vicious, strange-dogs-in-a-meathouse fight that shattered families, emptied neighborhoods, and sometimes created feuds that lasted generations after the war.

Daniel Woodrell writes with a remarkable style perfectly suited to the tale he tells. Taut, sparse, haunting, lyrical yet terrible, easing us lazily along from moments of unpretentious poetry to drop us jangling into stark, slamming violence. From the first page, I read it as drinking a rare liquor, sipping and savoring only a few pages a day, in no hurry to have it end.

Mr. Woodrell does not rub our faces in gore, but nor does he shrink from or glorify the brutality of killing. We have no doubt of what is happening, recoil from its horror, yet the image is drawn with such spare, severe strokes that we are left stunned as the aftermath of a car wreck - what just happened? When one character dies, the scene is engraved with a laser beam; "Oh, sweet Lord Jesus. It was way down there past terrible....My world bled to death."

Yet rather than being a story about a war and its battles, this a story about very young men - and women - whose lives are turned inside-out by that war. We see them involved in the very human struggle for place, for a sense of belonging, for those fleeting moments of gentleness, set against the smouldering, bloody backdrop of war, and jerked back to the bad-chili burning in the guts for payback when "comrades" are lost.

Rather than merely a war story, it is in part a love story, love of friend for friend, a man for a woman. There is no drippy sentimentality, no saccharine examinations of emotion. The same pen that strokes murder in sharp black lines etches with exquisite delicacy the gentler moments.

The reader may initially find the Victorian dialogue a bit awkard, but in only moments, there seems no other way the story could have been told. Nor do I feel that any other writer could have told this tale so well, save this native son of the Ozark country.

Told through the eyes of young Jake Roedel, who accepts what he sees with no idealism and only later any question, I recommend this book with a whole heart. Most especially I recommend it to those with an interest in the Missouri/Kansas conflict, or any part of the less-defined, personal aspects of the Civil War. For story, characterizations, marvelous use of language, and a haunting quality that lingers long after the last page is turned, I give it a solid five stars.

Rating:
Summary: The war without bugles and banners
Review: I love to read history of any sort but I'm not particularly interested in the American Civil War or the "border wars" that accompanied it. Having said this, I could hardly put this book down. Woodrell writes as easily as a canary sings and is as evocative in his language as a Sunday preacher. Some readers may reel from the sheer volume of casual violence in this book but, after all, that is what it was like during this period of time and wishing it didn't happen doesn't make it go away. Remarkably, I didn't find the story line particularly significant and the ending won't make you gulp; it is the individual people, not the events --- not even the gangs --- that take center stage. I found that character development and the use of language set in the tapestry of the times the most engaging aspects of this remarkable book.

Rating:
Summary: The basis for the movie Riding with the Devil
Review: I was surprised, when reading this book, to immediately discover that it's the basis for the Ang Lee movie Riding with the Devil. I don't recall the book ever being credited in the movie. I hope Woodrell got his cut, because this is a wonderful book. It is written at a high standard of literary quality and the characters, despite their relative amorality, are engaging. The heroine is refreshingly un-Jewellike. This is one of the few books on the Civil War in Missouri that I've really enjoyed, and the excellent writing style is the primary reason. I give it four stars rather than five because the research -- on daily life in the period as well as the war itself -- seemed to be just a little scant. But this is certainly an excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Into Cormac McCarthy Country
Review: Meaning no disrespect to Daniel Woodrell, who has created a little world of Louisiana mischief in a loosely-organized series of books (including "Woe to Live On", :Muscle for the Wing" ,etc.), but this little redneck departure runs right into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridien. Set in the border country of the Civil War, when Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas had a bumper drop of high-minded, low-down killers (on both sides, now, don't get your backs up) whose horsemanship was matched only by their facility at righteously justifying every depravity. Woodrell could have written the dialogue for the "Outlaw Josey Wales", and these southerners talk with that odd mixture of Elizabethan and backwoods English which so charmed observers from afar during the Northern War of Yankee Aggression. I'm not sure that we are supposed to like his protagonists, whose ethical sense tends to be of the "I'll-hand-you-the-rope-but-I- won't-lynch-that-innocent" variety, but the tale is rousing, if bleak, and the possibility of redemption is vigourously pursued.

Rating:
Summary: The basis for the movie Riding with the Devil
Review: Meaning no disrespect to Daniel Woodrell, who has created a little world of Louisiana mischief in a loosely-organized series of books (including "Woe to Live On", :Muscle for the Wing" ,etc.), but this little redneck departure runs right into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridien. Set in the border country of the Civil War, when Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas had a bumper drop of high-minded, low-down killers (on both sides, now, don't get your backs up) whose horsemanship was matched only by their facility at righteously justifying every depravity. Woodrell could have written the dialogue for the "Outlaw Josey Wales", and these southerners talk with that odd mixture of Elizabethan and backwoods English which so charmed observers from afar during the Northern War of Yankee Aggression. I'm not sure that we are supposed to like his protagonists, whose ethical sense tends to be of the "I'll-hand-you-the-rope-but-I- won't-lynch-that-innocent" variety, but the tale is rousing, if bleak, and the possibility of redemption is vigourously pursued.