Silver Light

by David Thomson

Overview

From 1865 to 1950, the multi-faceted world of the American West, its rich, colorful characters, and its many faces - historical, mythic, and cinematic - are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books

Set in 1950, the novel tells the tale of two 'relics' of the old West: Susan Garth, a reclusive octogenarian photographer, and her friend Bark Blaylock, an equally reclusive 75-year-old writer of Western comic books. Their life stories tell the tale of the West, a place of 'silver, space, the epitome of liberty.'

Susan and Bark cross paths with the characters of movies such as Wagonmaster, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. They had also been witness to the slaying of Billy the Kid, the cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Combining history, fiction, and the fabricated realities of film, Thomson examines the mythic image of the West and its meaning for Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857305022
Publisher:	Oldcastle Books
Publication date:	10/01/2022
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.

Editorial Reviews

Thomson's rangy metafictional collage blends figures from history and legend as well as characters from Hollywood films in an endlessly inventive cinematic meditation on the American West. Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd, cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at 80, and her longtime friend Bark Blaylock, a western writer/filmmaker who may be Wyatt Earp's son. A subplot involves James Averill, a wealthy Easterner who sees his philandering as a frontiersman's quest for knowledge. As the time frame shuttles between 1950 and the late 1800s, we meet Susan's father, a gentlemanly cattle rancher who reads Thomas Hardy, and serves as a springboard to the Old West of Bat Masterson, Geronimo and Billy the Kid. The cast includes Willa Cather, Montgomery Clift, Charles Ives, Judge Roy Bean and numerous characters smuggled in from such movies as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Thomson's ( Suspects ) artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Readers who delighted in Thomson's Suspects (LJ 5/15/85), a dark look at the betrayal of the American dream populated by characters from classic film noir movies, will thoroughly enjoy his new novel. The dark side of the American dream is still his subject, but this time he examines it through the lens of America's unique contribution to film art: the Western. Ever wonder what happened to characters from such classic films as The Searchers , Red River , or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ? Thomson tells us, having ``reel'' Western heroes like Matt Garth and Ethan Edwards mix with ``real'' Western legends like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. The result is a fascinating, ingenuous novel, an even more probing and astute look at the mythic image of the West, and its meaning for all of us, than Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove ( LJ 7/1/85).-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.

Library Journal