THOMAS BERGER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Thomas Berger is up at the Guardian online; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, except that my final line was omitted, which I thought was a shame, since it was a quote from Berger: 'real life is unbearable for me unless I can escape into fiction.'

I may have been a little harsh in calling him a 'recluse'. He appears to have been, like JD Salinger, not trying to avoid the world, not a hermit, but merely fed up with the business of the literary world, and trying to avoid its distraction. Like Salinger, he appears to have been very much a part of his small-town community. And unlike Salinger, he produced his fiction steadily.

That fiction was something he, and the reader, could escape into. You often got the sense in his novels that he was following not the plot, or the character, but the way the prose sounded, what he might call 'the tone', and that if you were not in tune with that you might be missing a great deal. He was a playful novelist (though that term would probably make him bristle, as he was deadly serious about it) in the post-modern sense.

A number of writers have claimed that Little Big Man is not his best book, which is fair game. But a few years ago in the Guardian someone named Tom Cox outsmarted us all by saying it was 'far from Berger's best novel'. On the contrary, what the picaresque epic style does is allow Berger to mix his tones, and the changes fit so well with each of Crabb's tales it keeps the reader involved.

Sometimes I got the sense, as in Teddy Villanova that Berger was trying to say something about the hard-boiled genre itself that I wasn't getting, or that wasn't particularly new. But it is that need to comment on, if not deconstruct, with his fiction, that reminded me of the Coens, and made me think they would be well-matched with a novel like The Feud.

I read somewhere that Berger was one of the last major novelists who served in World War II. James Salter springs to mind as one who is still with us, but I am hard-pressed to think of another. I tend to link Berger with slightly younger writers who dove into what the critics began calling meta-fictions, like Barth or Pynchon.But it's not a strong parallel because truly he was one of a kind.

THE REAL DEADWOOD: RICHARD MATHESON'S WILD BILL HICKOK

It's always sad when a writer's untimely death motivates you to find that unread book and, a day late as it were, finally read it. Such was the case for me recently with Richard Matheson, who was better known as an sf writer, or indeed a screenwriter, but who produced a number of westerns that share a clean prose, clear storyline, firm narrative drive, and deft characterisation. The Memoirs Of Wild Bill Hickok is no exception, but it's also a revisionist version of gunfighter myth, a sort of Little Big Man focussed in on just one man.

The excellent conceit of the novel is that it is indeed written by James Butler Hickok himself, and he is no gunfighter, much less a hero. In fact, he starts a sensitive soul, and grows into someone who's more coward than anything else; even his name is acquired through accident and misunderstanding. Fate seems to have a different path for Hickok that the one he might imagine, and in this case, fate deals him tough cards—not least his famous, fatal, aces and eights.

What makes the book most effective is that Hickok's own writing begins to follow the rough-edged frontier talk he has borrowed from the dime novels who've created his legend; the sensitive man proud of being well-read, winds up writing as if he really were the hero he's been written to be, and in that chasm, in that conflict between the man and myth, lies the story. It's fiction as life, and the scenes of Hickok on the stage have a true discomfort, even for the reader. And Bill finds his solace, as he did when he was a boy, in women, or failing that, as a man, in the bottle.

It seems a simple tale on the surface, but it's Matheson's version of Hickok's prose that gives this novel its edge, and makes it memorable. It reminds us of just how controlled, how spare, and how good Matheson was.

The Memoirs Of Wild Bill Hickok by Richard Matheson

Forge (Tom Doherty Associates) 1996, $6.99
ISBN 9780765362278

MODERN WESTERNS: MARIELLA, ACE & ME ON OPEN BOOK

I was on the BBC Radio 4 programme Open Book today, with host Mariella Frostrup and the writer Ace Atkins, to talk about westerns. The hook was two radio adaptations of western novels which will air on R4: Elmore Leonard's Hombre (you can see my take on the book, which I read recently, here), at 2:30 next Saturday 23rd, and Jack Schaefer's Shane the following Saturday. You can find programme on IPlayer here, for at least the next week, and it will be repeated on Thursday 21/3 at 3:30pm --it's a good listen, with Kate Atkinson preceding us, and an interesting discussion of betting on the Womens Prize for Fiction. Which, had I heard it, might have prompted me to note that westerns serve, for America, much the same function as costume drama does for Britain; it's way of reassuring the present by showing its roots in the past.

This was a discussion that was immense fun when we recorded it in the studio, and it's also one that could have go off in any number of directions--I could easily have traced the western through Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer through Melville's Confidence Man to Nick Carter--the dime novel western hero who becomes Nick Carter the detective later on--but Ace drew the comparison, of 'gunslingers moved to town', which made it unnecessary.

We might also have delved a little further into the connection between movies and novels, in reverse perhaps, because as Ace made clear, movies influence writers' own concepts of the west as much as books used to fertilise Hollywood's west. I probably ought to have made clear another distinction: westerns were a major part of the pulpy and slick magazine fictions just as film was coming into being--The Great Train Robbery, after all, was the first narrative film--but the movies' immense appetite for westerns was expressed primarily in B features, serials, and the like--John Wayne made many forgettable westerns in between Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail and John Ford's Stagecoach. Then television did the same thing in its early days--wringing the genre dry to the point that from the middle Sixties onward, we get western films that are in many ways commentaries on the genre and its conventions.

One thing that was cut was the question of what our favourite western novel actually is: Ace chose True Grit (our discussion of which also fell by the wayside) and I was torn between True Grit, Warlock by Oakley Hall and Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. Have a listen to the programme as it stands; you'll like it.