Well, immediately reading it I turned to a Dortmunder novel
for
relief....
Seriously, I lost a mundane job a year ago (last January) in
a company
which had in only a few years made a radical turn from being
a
socially responsible, employee-friendly company (I worked
directly
with the owners the first two years I was there) to an
employee-hostile company run by middle-managers who resented
the
employees under them who'd been there longer, and contrived
to get rid
of us (most of us are now gone, and now employees are
monitored by
video cameras and randomly drug-tested). There was some
bitterness. (I was glad to be out of that place, but angry
over the
way it occurred -- fired to make a place for my
supervisor's
crony.) So I was somewhat in a mood for THE AX.
THE AX is the story of a man who systematically murders
his
competition for a job, told from his (bitter) point of view.
I kept
wondering to what extent I should empathize with him. I mean,
it's
one thing to empathize with a criminal protagonist, like,
say, Parker
in Westlake's "Richard Stark" books, or even Dortmunder (who
never
seems to profit significantly from his crimes) in his
"comedies." We
"buy" the worldview of the protagonist, who knows he's a
criminal and
more or less accepts the rules by which he plays. But in THE
AX the
protagonist is a "good," non-criminal person at the start --
a man who
feels forced into a series of murders as the only rational
choice for
a man in his position. And lurking in the back of my mind
through
reading the book is the awareness that murder is *not* a
rational
choice, and that I'm suspending disbelief almost purely on
the basis
of Westlake's writing skills alone. Why should I root for
his
success in killing people who are surely in no way deserving
of this
fate? I mean, he's not a BUTCHER'S BOY, a professional
assassin,
knocking off fellow bad guys. And (SPOILER ALERT!) he gets
what he's
going after; he wins at the end. But now that he's murdered
several
times (and covered up his son's own criminal activity), and
adopted an
Us vs. Them mentality about the police, where does this leave
him at
the end of the book? Has he really gained? Can he turn
himself back
into the Good Citizen he'd been previously? Why do I doubt
the
"happiness" of the ending?
THE AX left me with an unclean feeling when I finished it.
How
about you?
--Ted White
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