I’ve read both John Sanford novels back to back in one day and now reviewing them I don’t want to be repetitive, suffice it to say the author’s style is very much of its time, very recognizable and very tough. Tough as in jerky, old leathery jerky, that would be the texture of Sanford’s Warrensburg books and their characters. Stretched and beaten down by life’s vagaries, used as target practices for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes and all that.
And here the main character, Aaron Platt, a man who has survived an abusive past and has labored himself to the bone ever since to eke out a living out of his land, finds another man on is property and lets him die. Not kills him, mind you, lets him die. Whether that is or isn’t a criminal offense is a a subject of a trial, which is one aspect of the narrative. The other two belong to the men themselves, a chronological autobiographical line from Aaron and a stream of consciousness ramblings from a dying man. And then…there’s the verse. That was Sanford beginning to politicize his work and utilizing more of his historical interest to demonstrate the way America’s violent and tragic past echoes into the present (at the time) day. And he decides to do that in verse, more or less mid book, out of nowhere. Which didn’t work for me and didn’t work for great many publishers here and abroad at the time either. Sanford stuck to his guns and insisted that verse remains, which probably explains to some extent the fact that he has never really found commercial success as an author was spent his life supported by his wife, a popular screenwriter at the time. For me, it doesn’t have so much to do with his ideology, so much as it does with a messed up storyline. It didn’t work within the novel, it didn’t fit, it screwed up the dramatic narrative and so on. The delirious ramblings were tough enough, but verse…no, just no. Mind you, Jack Mearns, Sanford’s biographer who provides a very good introduction (for book one) and afterword here to Brash’s Sanford’s rereleases absolutely loved it, but he seems to be a superfan, the likes of which Sanford might not have had too many of, judging, among many other things, by the scarcity of readers’ book reviews out there. I’m the first to rate and review this edition and there were only a few for his gloriously campier covered early publication under the title seventy Times Seven (for some reason Mearns didn’t go into). Anyway…there’s a good story here, a genuinely potent tale of crime and punishment within two strikingly juxtaposing lifestyles. The main theme, I’d say, is justice, be it legal or moral variant. So it’s compelling in a way, but it isn’t an easy or an easily enjoyable read. And it screams of an author beginning to spiral into deliberate obscurity through experimentation. Which is to say I don’t regret reading Sanford and I don’t think I need to read any more of him. Warrensburg is, after all, too bleak, even conventionally fictionalized. Thanks Brash publishers.
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