Homer on the Range:
HORAN, TIM
Homer on the Range The Stars In Their Courses. By Harry Brown. Knopf. 362 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Tim Horan Promotion Director, Bantam Books THIS IS THE year of the big Western novel, big in aim...
...To cap this Homeric episode Brown adopts the final line of the Iliad: "Such were the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses...
...In the exertions of their amorous reunion Arch suffers a heart attack, but joins the anti-Randal forces because he needs money...
...Shot in the lungs, Pax chokes on his own blood, fulfilling Cora's prophecy...
...The Randal cowhands, seeking vengeance for Luke's death, concentrate their fire on the man astride the gleaming silver saddle...
...While Lacy is in town stirring up trouble, Percy Randal sends his son, Pax, as a goodwill emissary to the Lacy ranch...
...According to Cora this incestuous violation and Pax' sinful liaison with Helen have cursed the family and purification can come only through bloodletting...
...he has nothing of value except a great black horse and a magnificent silver saddle...
...The site of his duel with Arch turns out to be the setting for Hallock's recurrent dream of death, a nightmare that has haunted him for years...
...The ranchers, skeptical of Lacy's ranting against the fancied Randal plot, change their minds when it appears that a Randal has abducted Mark's wife...
...Arch decides to hole up with his erstwhile mistress...
...The gods, it would seem, are propitiated...
...Now comes another impressive work that represents not so much the creation of a Western epic as the transplanting of a Greek one...
...Then Hallock rides off on Arch's black gelding, taken from the slain Pace Gray...
...Cora revels in the fruition of her gloomy prophecies and we learn that her neurotic behavior stems from her having been raped by her brother, Pax, fourteen years earlier...
...Maude Fletcher, who has sustained herself in his absence as "a respectable whore, selective in her clientele...
...In his new novel Harry Brown has drawn freely on Homer with no effort to disguise his source...
...In frontier morality, apparently, wife-stealing is only a shade less heinous than horse-stealing...
...The death of Pace Gray, son-image and only object of deep affection for Arch, sends Arch off to kill Hallock...
...Lest the reader be lulled by this pastoral scene, he is immediately warned that fate is busily weaving a pattern of destruction for the happy gathering...
...The patriarch is Percy (Priam), husband of Harriet (Hecabe) and sire of Hallock (Hector), Pax (Paris), Cora (Cassandra) and Luke...
...Fleeing the law...
...One thread is in the form of an accident of nature, high in the mountains near the source of the river upon which all Fork-handle ranchers must depend...
...There is mastery in the way his dialogue delineates people, weak and strong, and conveys the nature of relationships that evoke our sympathy...
...Numbed by this recognition, the famed horseman is rendered helpless by his rearing mount as guns are drawn...
...Ellen is as obtuse as she is beautiful, as erotic as she is simple-minded...
...With fate guiding their aim, men shoot with superhuman accuracy...
...At the Randal ranch Luke's death and subsequent events have had a shattering effect...
...his foot catches in the stirrup and he is battered to pulp just as his Trojan prototype was dragged behind the horse of Achilles...
...When Ellen (Helen) Lacy begs him for protection from her brooding spouse, Pax agrees to take the lovely creature to the Randal place...
...As Arch cremated Pace Gray's body, so the loyal Maude makes her home a funeral pyre for Arch...
...The Achilles in Brown's version is a legendary gunman named Arch Eastmere, just returned to the Fork-handle after several years of dark deeds in Mexico...
...The story begins as friends and neighbors gather to celebrate Luke's coming of age on a golden Sunday in June, 1879...
...Alas, Pax is the Casanova of the cattle country, a Don Juan in dungarees...
...At the Randal picnic destiny takes the form of a rancher, Mark (Mene-Iaus) Lacy, who accuses the Randals of damming the river to ruin neighboring ranches...
...The collapse of a rock formation in the bed of the stream abruptly cuts the flow of water...
...En route to effect a peaceful settlement with his boyhood friend, Hallock Randal, Arch kills young Luke in a tragic misunderstanding...
...While he is in a drunken stupor, his best friend, Pace (Patroclus) Gray, takes Arch's horse and joins the Lacy faction in a nocturnal invasion of Randal land...
...The Trojan battlefield becomes a cattle range on the American frontier...
...The accents are those of "Gunsmoke" or "Have Gun, Will Travel" rather than the stately tones of gods and demi-gods, but here are the inevitable workings of fate, the familiar symbols, the antagonists as before...
...Wounded (like Hector) in the neck, Hallock falls...
...Indeed, the principal characters bear names that are similar, at least in the initial letter, to their counterparts in the Iliad...
...Lacy's brother, Alan (Agamemnon), quickly organizes a group to fight the Randals...
...Reviewed by Tim Horan Promotion Director, Bantam Books THIS IS THE year of the big Western novel, big in aim and, on occasion, in accomplishment...
...She announces that the gods will be appeased only when Pax chokes on his own blood...
...At times the style, with its repetition and imagery, seems self-conscious, and the devices distracting, but fortunately the distractions do not prevail over Harry Brown's obvious talents...
...In the novel, while the other Randals search for Hal-lock's body, Pax dallies in bed with Ellen...
...The Grecian overtones are relentless, the people lusty, the battles shockingly bloody...
...Brown's Trojans are the Randal family, whose ranch is much the largest in the Forkhandle valley...
...Challenged by Arch, Hallock Randal, renowned for his valor and horsemanship, bids farewell to his wife, Ann (Andromache), who has already accepted the fact of her husband's death...
...At the moment he expires, the river begins to run again...
...Says the author: "Thus made they funeral for Hallock, breaker of Horses...
...His characters are impressive, their tragic history is compelling...
...Long before they reach home, she and Pax are rolling in the pine needles...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 32
