Muscle peaks
Paul Ableman
The Noble Enemy Charles Fox (Granada pp.383,i6.95) This is a first novel that reads like the work of a mature novelist at the height of his powers. It is quite certainly a masterpiece. It chilled me, appalled me, ino4d me, terrified me and now and then awed me with its ability to evoke the exact lineaments of consciousness in extreme situations.
According to the blurb 'The Noble Enemy is loosely based upon an incident that occurred in Idaho ten years ago'. I don't know how much research Mr Fox devoted to preparing for his task, whether he tape-recorded interviews with the single survivor and others concerned in the events and modelled his characters directly on the inhabitants of the small Idaho town, which is the focus of the action, or whether he simply read an item in a newspaper and then generated his majestic book purely from his creative resources. it would be of considerable technical interest to know these things but it would be irrelevant to the quality of his achievement. Quite apart from the fact that much of the fearful action was by its nature impervious to close scrutiny, the work is essentially a product of the imagination, no matter how closely its narrative duplicates things that really occurred in the Rocky Mountains of America.
Only a great literary artist could evoke with so potent a pen such a complex panorama. Mr Fox's prose can soften to a sigh, roar into a mountain storm, subtly bring very various people to life, build a small town in the mountains and wing out to survey the world beyond. It is businesslike prose, intent on its job, contemptuous of literary finesse. It is not, as it happens, the kind of prose that naturally arouses my enthusiasm but it is indisputably a supple and immensely powerful instrument.
I suppose this could be called 'a man's book'. At its heart is a nightmare ordeal in a snowfield. Its chief characters are male and it could, at one level, be described as a study in modes of machismo. Guns and gunplay are prominent in the action and women figure chiefly as erotic motivating forces. However, the women (with one important exception that we will return to) are absolutely convincing and we never lose sight of the fact that, behind the swearing and drinking and shooting of the men, the women preserve the fabric of life. Moreover, the little mountain town of Cope., Idaho, is realised as an organic community, an indisputablepiece of environment and the home of families, so that the book never becomes an adventure yarn. The essence of the action reflects the essence of America and so it is reasonable to suppose that women will also respond to the book.
Mike Arizo, half Portuguese and half Indian, buys a fighting dog, a pit bull, trains him and matches him in a fighting pit. Mike is seeking status or at least emergence from the crowd. But the dog, Baby Zeus, dies of haemorrhagic shock after its first, drawn fight. Heartbroken, Arizo gives away his little house and heads for the mountains where he thinks an old friend may be working as a short order cook.
When he reaches the town of Cope he finds that his friend has moved on. Mike prepares to follow him but two encounters first delay him and then bind him to the town and ultimately project him towards his hellish ordeal in Copper Basin. The first meeting is with Rick Coulter who has been looking for a buddy all his life. Coulter, married to easy-going, indulgent Sue-Ellen, is the town stud, inordinately proud of his, to put it delicately, lavish generative apparatus. He works as a quarryman. The other men in town are understandably resentful of Rick because of his propensity for laying their wives and shooting off his mouth about his sexual achievements. They won't go hunting with him. Rick begs Arizo to stay and hunt with him, Arizo is undecided but then meets Sandy, a girl who works in the town diner.
Now Sandy is the Important exception' I mentioned above when complimenting the author on his character drawing. I never quite believed in Sandy. For one thing, she is credited with ESP and I remain sceptical about this modish magic. But much more significantly, she is, to some extent, an idealised figure, the embodiment of Arizo's long yearning for female tenderness. She is movingly portrayed and there is nothing two-dimensional about her but somehow, while Arizo's fundamental nobility convinced me, I couldn't completely accept Sandy. It is not, in the context of the book, an important flaw since Sandy's role in the action is essentially as a complement to Arizo's tenderness.
Arizo moves in with Sandy and gets a job in the quarry with Coulter. And all the while winter is settling on the mountains. A modestly up-market couple throw a party and there Coulter closes in on Marlene, an ex-rodeo rider's wife, with whom he has started an affair. In a scene of magnificent farce, the couple, unwisely copulating against a fragile partition, are precipitated into the midst of the festivities: `Poulsen realked he was looking at Coulter wedged between the delicate, well-splayed legs of his wife, whose skirt was somehow about her waist and from whose right boot — now thrust kicking high into the air — flapped the white panties of surrender.' It is farce which soon begins to reveal itself as the matrix of tragedy. The next day Arizo and Coulter take their rifles into the mountains for a last haul of venison before the big snows start to fall. Their car is followed by a pick-up truck containing Poulsen, the cuckolded husband, and a town youth called Coo-Coo. The horror begins.
Some 40 days later, a single survivor shuffles down out of the mountains. He is in surprisingly good condition. Why? The answer embraces all that has happened in those 40 days, a chronicle of suffering, violence, courage and madness but not, as some may assume at this point, cannibalism. The men behave more or less creditably but there are no heroes or villains. There is only a maelstrom of testing experience which extends in one direction to the fringes of mystical experience and in the other to selfish banality. It includes moments, such as that in which Arizo returns his bare, frost-bitten feet to the snowbank simply to anaesthetise them, as harrowing as anything in Jack London. And after the mountains comes the ordeal by fellow citizens.
Somewhere, I should imagine, eager film men are already reshaping this narrative into a shooting script. Their work will be light. It will require little more than inserting camera instructions into the text. Because the book irresistibly suggests cinema. It is so intensely visual that the reader seems to have seen the glittering deadly sweep of Copper Basin, to have watched the lynch party of snowmobiles fanning out up the mountain, to know the interior of the Two Ball Inn where Arizo has his fateful encounter with Coulter.
But The Noble Enemy is not filmorientated merely because Charles Fox, like hosts of mediocre pen-pushers, has aspired no higher than writing a thin novel conceived as the first stage of a Hollywood spectacular. Rather it recalls the cinema because the enhanced visual awareness that has been generated by 20th-century media is an important, and conscious, part of the author's creative equipment. And no camera can take us where Fox's pen probes expertly, into the deepest levels of human consciousness. I predict that a splendid film will be made from this book but that it will remain, for all its excellence, merely the echo of a work of art. Film technique supplies, amongst other things, the taut cross-cutting between the men in the Basin, the activities of the Sheriff and his searchparties and the grim waiting of the townspeople. The blurb describes the four victims (for the survivor is, if anything, the chief victim) as 'misfits'. But I doubt if Mr Fox intended any such implication. The book rather suggests that all Americans are, in some degree, misfits in their own country. What is a true American? No one has discovered. The Declaration of Independence states that 'all men are created free „ [and] are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights' but a few paragraphs later it refers to 'the merciless Indian savages'. This contradiction, built into the ideological foundation of the nation and fortified by heterogeneous immigration perpetually injecting new values into the culture, has never been resolved. It has resulted in all Americans, no matter how wealthy and sophisticated or, alternatively, how innocent and humble, remaining to some extent frontiersmen, the quintessential misfits. Mr Fox, an Englishman by birth and upbringing, and perhaps possessed of a more objective eye than most American authors, has perceived this fundamental truth which informs his analysis of character and motivation in The Noble Enemy. In most post-war novels, the new free dom to use taboo words and describe sexual events freely is basely exploited. It is used merely to provide an additional attraction. Sex is grafted onto the other elements in what remain essentially traditional concepts of narrative and character. A work like The Noble Enemy is needed to vindicate that freedom. For this novel would be inconceivable without it. The men's language is rough and liberally salted with obscenities. This generates verisimilitude but is not indispensable. What is central to the novel's achievement is the sense that Mr Fox conveys of sexual tension — attraction, antagonism, sublimation — governing all the events and penetrating the tiniest recesses of the action. There are not many of what are idiotically called 'explicit sex scenes' in the book but those it does contain, like the one I have quoted, are vital to an interior understanding of the events. The Noble Enemy is an account of the ordeal undergone by four unsophisticated men from a one-horse American town in the Idaho Rockies. gut Charles Fox makes that ordeal, and its attendant events, deeply relevant to the experience of people everywhere. It is a superb achievement.
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