Dawson, reluctantly shamed into vengeance by stonehearted Joanna, gives clumsy chase. All of these eventually convince the brothers to lose themselves deep in Texas. The outlaw Bentleys flee into Mexico on horseback, enduring extreme weather, little food, a blistering, capricious trail fraught with murderous desperados, and refugees fleeing ahead of revolutionary death squads. Dawson’s only son has been murdered by opportunistic, wannabe rustlers who believe, as a Mexican lawman drives home to Dawson, “There is no fault, senór-only targets and choices.” In Longpine, a tiny wart of a town, dilletante cattleman “Randy the Dandy” Dawson can barely sit a horse much less defend his property or family, readers discover, piecing together narrative fragments like shards of mirror glass from the story’s fractured, disturbing outset. The tale is a classic morality play of good and evil, strength and softness, vengeance and justice, law and vigilantism, set against a beautiful, sweeping backdrop of the American Southwest. That, in one breath, is the finely drawn dilemma James Wade turns over and over like a precious, light-refracting, darkness-harboring gemstone that is All Things Left Wild. Night, Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne warned, is but the shadow of light, and life just the shadow of death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |