Customer Reviews

The watchful gods and other stories

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

These ten stories by Western novelist, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, are gems of articulate story-telling and masterful prose. While Van Tilburg Clark`s reputation was forged with his gritty profile of mob violence in `The Ox-Bow Incident,` his true genius lies in documenting the tense relationships humans forge with their natural environment. Clark`s favorite character type, the lone maverick, must learn to find a place within the natural order or suffer the consequences.

In `Indian Well,` nature reigns supreme from the first sentence. "In this dead land, like a vast relief model, the only allegiance was to the sun. Even night was not strong enough to resist..." The backdrop is the harsh, unforgiving Mojave Desert where a prospector and his burro companion find a rare spring and attempt to homestead it. Ever the omniscient narrator, Clark describes how the natural inhabitants react to the intruder, the rattler emerging from his darkened den, the road-runner hovering motionless before a pool.... When a curious cougar finally shows up and threatens the newcomers` serenity, a dramatic showdown ensues.

In `The Fish Who Could Close His Eyes,' a lonely aquarium worker gets caught up in a world beyond his understanding. Unlike the hardened prospector in `Indian Well' or the rapacious older brother in Clark`s masterful novel, `The Track of The Cat,' Tad Manson is another stock Clarkian character: the dreamy idiot-savant at home only in nature. Tad`s joys are simple: the plants he attends to, the marine creatures he feeds, the trance-like excursions on a local beach. He soon `befriends` a rare fish at the institute and plans to free it from captivity. Yet, his intervention has a costly side-effect. For Clark, it is the meddling human hand, whether for harm or for help, that upsets the natural balance.

The collection`s finest pieces are also its longest ones. A master of exhaustive description, Clark uses the novella`s length to let his stories take wing. "Hook' is one such example. In this story of a young hawk's rise and demise among the amber hills of California`s coastal range, Clark immerses himself in the soul of his winged protagonist. Beak bloodied, Hook searches the dark ravines for dour-colored mates and for potential foes. Wounded by an angry farmer, Hook is brought low, hiding from enemies during the day and scavenging during the nights. In a final clash of titans, Clark`s noble warrior soon faces his ultimate antagonist. Clark offers an unsparing epitaph. "Courageous and cruel death, however it may afterword sicken the one who has watched it, is impossible to look away from."

If `Hook' highlights Clark`s genius in unveiling instincts in the animal kingdom, then `The Watchful Gods' does much the same with humans. The longest and arguably best story of the collection, `The Watchful Gods' is a powerful tale of innocence lost. Buck, its dreamy teenage hero, flees the confines of family and society by spending his hours among the rock outcroppings and pounding surf of his `secret beach.` His best friends are the invisible `sprites` and spirits of nature who comfort and bring rare peace. When he receives a long-coveted .22 rifle from his father, his equanimity is challenged. Possessed with potential malevolence, Buck is forced to choose sides. Is he truly one with the `gods of light` or yet another slave to the repressive `fog god?` Spying his first potential `target,' Buck is tested against the lure of the trigger, a test he soon fails. "Buck, the body, longed to throw the vicious twenty-two into the brush and run away, as far as he could, from the place where he had done such a thing. He didn`t though." Master at exposing our contradictory motivations, Clark refuses the easy ending, the clean escape, the tidy repentance and instead leads the reader to a more hesitant resolution.

In all ten stories, Walter Van Tilburg Clark traces the spiritual and psychological evolution of those who dare confront an omnipotent natural order. Few writers match his talent in so effortlessly capturing the meeting point between man and wilderness. Moreover, Clark`s language has few equals in its sparkling originality. His prose bubbles with the rare word (tocsin?) and sings with a melodious syntax. Deeper meanings trickle through sentences Emersonian in their expansive potentialities. "His attention, exhausted by long straining after particulars, drowsed out of touch, and formless, cosmic wonderings stirred slowly in him."

Here are a few sentences from a short article that appeared Nov 21, 2004 in the Washington (DC) Post BOOKWORLD. It was this article that made me interested in this book.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the 1950s Walter Van Tilburg Clark seemed on his way to becoming a major American writer, both a popular and a critical success. His first and third novels, "The Ox-Bow Incident" and "The Track of the Cat", were made into movies. And one of his short stories, "The Wind and the Snow of Winter," an elegy for freewheeling days on the Western frontier that still has few equals, was an immediate classic. ... Today Clark, who died in 1971, is at least in print: all three novels, along with "The Watchful Gods and Other Stories", the collection in which "The Wind and the Snow of Winter" appears. But he has become an in-crowd kind of writer, championed by a Stendhalian happy few, such as Wallace Stegner, and otherwise getting little attention.

Literary content was wonderful. Book started to fall apart as I read it. One of the worst reading copies I ever bought.