Resolution
by Robert B. Parker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert B. ParkerEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-05
ISBN: 0425227995
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Book Reviews of Resolution
Book Review: Gunslingers and Philosophers
Summary: 3 Stars
After parting from his partner, marshal-for-hire Virgil Cole in the little Western town of Appaloosa (last seen in the previous Western novel by Parker of that name), longtime professional sidekick Everett Hitch pulls up in an even smaller more marginal town called Resolution where he gets a gig as a bar bouncer or "lookout", keeping the peace in the biggest saloon in town, an establishment owned by a certain "wall-eyed" capitalist named Wolfson. The saloon keeper turns out to have big dreams about owning the rest of the town but the local mining entrepreneur, an Irish immigrant named Eamon O'Malley, and the lumber mill owner, Fritz Stark, stand in his way. O'Malley is as acquisitive as Wolfson though Stark couldn't care less as Hitch quickly makes a name for himself in his new position when he proves to be tougher than the town's local gunsel who happens to be in O'Malley's pay. The absence of any kind of town governance, including mayor, town council or marshal now leaves Hitch the de facto peacekeeper for the little settlement of Resolution and folks in trouble flock to the local bouncer for protection.
Wolfson sees his opportunity (indeed, he had been waiting for just the right bouncer to come along) and decides to use Hitch to leverage his saloon and other town holdings into total municipal dominance. When O'Malley brings in two outside gun hands to replace the one Hitch removed, a couple of killers named Cato and Rose, and makes his move on Wolfson, the saloon keeper quickly begins pushing for a confrontation. The momentum picks up markedly when Hitch's longtime pal and senior partner, the indomitable gunman Virgil Cole, rolls into town after having lost his lady love to another back in Appaloosa. A strained competition between Cole and Hitch, on Wolfson's side (more or less!), and Cato and Rose, for O'Malley, soon reaches a boiling point when Wolfson takes the initiative.
The first part of the novel is reminiscent of the well-known Japanese samurai flick, Yojimbo (Criterion Collection Spine #52), in which a deadly if itinerant samurai (played by Toshiro Mifune) strolls into a small Japanese village that's being torn apart by two feuding criminal factions. Lacking anything else to do while feeling a grudging dislike for the scurrilous cutthroats on both sides, the vagrant samurai sets out to play them off against each other and bring both groups down. But the conflict in the little town of Resolution between mine owner O'Malley and town businessman Wolfson doesn't quite follow that path when, in an early surprise, one side pre-emptively finishes the other off and seemingly brings the story to a premature end.
But the real conflict in Resolution turns out to run a bit deeper. Complicating things are a bunch of small ranchers trying to make a go of it on the land nearby, men that businessman Wolfson is set on driving out so he can take control of their lands. As Hitch comes to see (or maybe he saw it from the start but didn't care all that much -- or didn't think it his business), Wolfson and O'Malley are infected with top dog syndrome. It doesn't matter how much either of them has, just that they're the guys who have it, and that means all of it.
Stark, the mill owner, is different and keeps out of the feuding that finally erupts. But when the smoke clears, Wolfson finds he has a new problem on his hands. Cole, Hitch, Cato and Rose share a common gunfighters' ethic and a common conviction that, as Mao tze-T'ung famously put it, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- in this case, theirs. While not challenging Wolfson overtly, they subtly join forces and he starts to grow edgy, realizing that, though he's the guy paying the bills, they're really the ones calling the shots with no law in town but their guns. Recognizing the shift in power that has occurred as a result of his machinations, Wolfson doesn't like it one bit.
As the initial conflict boils over into another with the local ranchers and farmers, Cole finds himself protecting the wife of one of the ranchers from spousal abuse when her husband's furstration at Wolfson's scheming manipulations to take his land -- and everyone else's -- drives him to punching and kicking her in front of the kids. When the four gunman decide to close ranks around poor Mrs. Redman, Wolfson makes another not unexpected move and hires a gang of cutthroats from out of town, led by a scandal ridden ex-army captain and his buddy, described as a "sloe-eyed" deadly gunman named Swann (who, it's suggested, is also the ex-captain's lover). With twenty tough guns now at his back, Wolfson abruptly sacks Cole and Hitch, along with their recently discovered new buddies, Cato and Rose, and, following a brief interlude of marauding Shoshone who manage to drive the ranchers from their homes and Stark from his mill, the town's local robber baron moves against the ranchers as well. But these people, having sought safety en masse with their families at Stark's now destroyed mill, decide to make a fight of it.
The second part of this novel resonates with yet another well-known samurai movie, Seven Samurai (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray], in which six samurai and a samurai wannabe (again played by Toshiro Mifune!) take on a gang of forty or more bandits to save a small village of rice farmers. Now Cole and his three companeros must do as the seven samurai did in their encounter with the wild bandits and proceed to pick off various members of the new band of "deputies" brought in by Wolfson to even up the odds. Of course our noble gunmen always manage to do it in what passes, in their "code" anyway, for a fair fight, calling the real bad guys out and giving them a chance to draw first (though Cole and his boys don't always have the good manners to wait, having once called attention to themselves).
The whole tale is tied together by the self-doubting ex-marshal Virgil Cole who has carried his uncertainties with him out of Appaloosa. A lawman all his life (if only of the hired gun variety), Cole is painfully aware that, because of something that happened in Appaloosa, he has crossed the line and isn't quite sure why or where that line was -- or where he, himself, now belongs. If he isn't enforcing laws, he worries, is he just another one of the bad guys, just another hired gun?
In a series of talks with old buddy Hitch, the two men consider John Locke's notion of governance as social contract and Rousseau's idealization of natural man, while Cole tries to work out his personal issues. All the while he is putting off his planned trip to Texas to retrieve his lost mistress, the woman who, back in Appaloosa, had been the cause of all his travails. Hitch, for his part, can't quite decide whether to go or stay as the situation in Resolution deteriorates but, by book's end, it's Virgil Cole who keeps them there, intent on fixing things somehow and finding good in himself again. And so the four buddies, having switched sides (in the case of Cato and Rose, twice!), decide to restore law and order to Resolution by taking on the new town marshal and his nineteen killer deputies.
Parker, as usual, in a master's spare prose reminiscent of Hemingway at his sharpest, is an artist with tightly drawn dialogue and strongly limned scenes of the old West although he occasionally crosses a line into almost formulaic self-parody (a problem that plagued Hemingway in his later work, too). The narrative pace is quick though, despite the emphasis on Cole's inner turmoil and the philosophical problems plaguing the conflicted gunfighter. Through Cole's psychological struggles, worked out on the external canvas of the town of Resolution, Parker offers a vision of a greater moral truth that overrides all else and which makes the law, or its lack, a function of that higher moral good he sees reflected in the honor of hard men.
Along the way we're treated to a rather grim picture of the capitalist ethos that roots the impulse to do business in the larger and deeper drive some men have to be top rooster in the henhouse -- and what happens to those who can't quite cut it, or to those others, like Cole and Hitch and their two newfound buddies, who just see themselves as playing in a different barnyard. As with all good morality tales (and so many westerns really boil down to that), all is set to rights in the end as our hard edged gunmen, knights errant in this kind of narrative, finally ride off into the sunset -- or, as in the case of Cole and Hitch, down to Texas in search of Cole's lost paramour, about whom he no longer harbors the great illusions of yore.
Stuart W. Mirsky
author of The King of Vinland's Saga
Summary of Resolution
Features the main characters first introduced in Appaloosa- now a major motion picture from New Line Cinema.
A greedy mine owner threatens the coalition of local ranchers in the town of Resolution, pitching two honorable gunfighters, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, into a make-shift war that'll challenge their friendship -and the violently shifting laws of the West.
A greedy mine owner threatens the coalition of local ranchers in the town of Resolution, pitching two honorable gunfighters, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, into a make-shift war that'll challenge their friendship -and the violently shifting laws of the West.
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