23 April 2008 15:34
i've re-read some books recently that were favourites at one time or another, one being a louis l'amour novel i'm reading for the forth or fifth time. the walking drum is a fictional first person account set in europe during the 12th century. in typical louis la'mour fashion the main character wanders through life uttering heavy-handed philosophical statements at every turn. myself—ever the fan of escapist fiction—am quick to skim these paragraphs (or sometimes entire pages) in order to get to the good bits where the hero escapes death by narrow threads repeatedly, recovers from near-fatal wounds in weeks, and manages to successfully woo a new girl in every new region he wanders to. l'amour is much more palatable in the standard length paperback venue. this particular hardback is somewhere in the 400 page range and gives him enough paper real estate to begin to repeat himself. here's his usual plot: hero meets girl, hero meets bad guy, hero quickly makes derogatory comments to bad guy to solidly enforce his impending destruction by bad guy and his goons, hero successfully and one handedly kills or wounds all the bad guy's goons then narrowly succeeds in killing the bad guy himself in a fight to the death, finally hero whimsically leaves the girl in favor of riding off into the sunset (alternative ending: hero gets the girl). for this longer novel his plot is to cycle through his standard plot four times in a row by just changing the places and the names. then the hero can wind up riding off into the sunset three times and finally keep the last girl (the walking drum i think actually has a total of five or six girls, it's been a while and i haven't gotten close to the end yet). it really sounds pretty bad in condensed form like this, but the actual book is spread out over 400 pages so all that filler helps me fight the gag reflex. l'amour put a lot of research into his books too, so there's some value in that once you factor out l'amour's considerable bias against the "christians" of the time.15:34 email me permalink / commentary (0)
