Alaskan Stories by John Mitchell

Abstract

60 Western American Literature black, silent rider to the sea,” and later, “Downshore the dull surf boomed”) and combine with the writer’s cadences to give Blood Meridian both poetry and strength. As the title might indicate, gore, the book’s strongest image, dominates. If the reader has ever witnessed or cleaned up the results ofa totally successful ambush, he (for most American women haven’t) will be prepared for the atrocities man commits upon man in this story; if he has not, the book will slam into him like a Sam Peckinpah film. The protagonist, a nameless and taciturn young Everyman known only as “the kid,” runs away from home at fourteen to the West to keep, as it appears, his appointment with his particular destiny. The book ends in his twentyeighth year, the time intervening filled with his wandering throughout the West from one scrape, adventure and encounter to more of the same. It is not, however, the kid who dominates McCarthy’s terra damnata, but “Judge” Holden, an enigmatic giant, a genius who proves, Rennaissancelike , master of sciences, arts, crafts, war, languages—of the world. At once nihilist, absurdist, rationalist and irrationalist, the powerful judge islimned in heroic proportions, an embodiment of the evil too often inherent in the ways man handles his knowledge. Holden, the most “civilized” and rational char­ acter in the book, exhibits many of its greatest cruelties, psychological and physical, ordering, then destroying—like western man—the world without. The reader learns little ofimport about the kid that isnotfiltered through or later interpreted by the judge. As Holden berates his sometime colleague for failure to dedicate himselfwholly to war, the latter’sdull, animal integrity becomes apparent. Immortality, the freedom to dance, evades him, says Holden, for it is only gained in the flux of combat through relentless cruelty and lack of mercy. Earlier in the story, another character asks about Holden, “What’s he a judge of?” When in the final pages the judge thus indicts the kid, the reader learns that he is a judge of the protagonist and ultimately of all mankind. A powerful yet dreamlike book, Blood Meridian will not appeal to the reader who either sees or seeks the nice and the pleasant in man and hisworld. BILL BAINES Truckee Meadows Community College Alaskan Stories. By John Mitchell. (Wasilla, Alaska: Plover Press, 1984. 75 pages, $11.50.) In the popular view the consummate Alaskan is a post-adolescent mav­ erick who proves himself by getting back to the basics of frontier life even though they are not necessary to making a living anymore. The concept is straightforward. You may be anti-social, but at least you solve your own problems. The five stories in this collection comment on this theme from different angles. A boy goes commercial fishing in Washington with his father after the salmon run in Alaska has failed. The father is exposed in his tough-guy Reviews 61 vendetta against conventionality as represented by the Lower 48. A young man cools to marriage after a tense summer as a deck hand living in confined conditions with an insensitive skipper. Marriage would be like that, he thinks. So much for love. “The Compleat Moose Hunter” is a high school boy’s theme. The best story in the book, its language reveals the authentic pride and bitterness of poverty and homesteading and the compromises required to survive. This story puts the reader on notice;simple myths contain disturb­ ing truths. More complex and nearly as well executed, “Whitemare” describes a man’s seasonal homecoming in spring. To maintain his mental balance, he winters “outside” visiting galleries and catching up on culture, avoiding, not the weather, but the yokels who refuse to acknowledge fine feelings. Drawn by the richness of characters and challenges, he returns to hisvandalized cabin to re-establish his fishing rights on Cook Inlet, a tough but sensitive man mature enough to value his mind—the new Alaskan, perhaps. These stories, while somewhat uneven in quality due to occasional editorializing, are rich with Alaskan detail—tire chains on the floor on the passenger side of a pickup, removing shoes when entering a home, mud, bright or...