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4.0 out of 5 stars
Oedipus, Meet Sir James George Frazier......, April 1 2004
Like a lot of reviewers, I read this book around the time it was first published. I read it again after almost thirty years. I found it a powerful and suspenseful tale back then, I think the level of writing--popular suspense thriller--holds up well but the underpinnings are a little creaky, though I think the primal nature of his allusions helps to impart a power to the story that, in some ways, the writing doesn't always provide.For example, the Oedipal nature of Ned's story--Greek son who despoils his mother (Mother Earth, in this case) and suffers gruesome disfigurement (not dissimilar to that suffered by Oedipus himself.) The Corn rites which seem to come directly from Frazier's "The Golden Bough." These are cultural details which infuse the story with their power. Which doesn't mean there aren't issues. Cornish descendants might be expected to practice Celtic or Druidic fertility rites rather than ones more resemblant to (and, late in the book, are described as arising from) Ancient Greek ones. (Hint: much less in the way of violence in the former and little, if any, sex) And, speaking of sex, the proximate situation with Justin Hooke at the, pardon the pun, penultimate climax, leaves one wondering...hands securely bound behind his back? Seems like rather difficult physical situation.... As for the writing. The plotting is effective though one feels that Tryon moves the downhill slide of Ned a little quickly, perhaps in anticipation of the twists at the end. Ned and the Widow Fortune are relatively well-realized but the rest of the characters rarely rise above types: the town tramp, the town golden boy. Where this lack of secondary characterization hurts the book most is in the character of Ned's wife, Beth, who remains something of a cypher through much of the book. Tryon appears to be going for a subtle shift in her as she comes under the sway of the widow and the town, and yet he feels he has to stage these melodramatic scenes--Kate's "death" and Tamar's "rape" in order to drive her motivations in distancing herself from Ned and in participating in Harvest Home. As for Kate, the daughter, she is little more than a plot device. Where I think that Tryon succeeds is in his avoidance of the standard American Gothic horror novel, a la Stephen King. He has respect for the cultural and spiritual significance of the type of society he is writing about and their rituals--unlike a lot of creative types back then (this era was bookended by stuff like "Easy Rider" and "Deliverance" which embodied the Urban Coastals paranoia about "country folk.") We can shudder in horror at the fate of those, like Ned, who cross the residents of Cornwall Coombe, and we can intellectualize their bloody acts, but the primal nature of their beliefs can't be so easily discounted--Beth's condition at the end of the novel seems to indicate that, perhaps, they may be right.
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