In New Mexico, he is welcomed at the Godinez hacienda, and there he falls in love with the beauti ful Elena. As Pasque finds his way through ranch country into the mining camps of Colorado and further south into New Mexico, he is sometimes aided by char acters who seem to possess magical insight or powers. Work has used his knowledge of the Old West and his sensitivity to the idiom of those days to cre ate a novel whose authenticity is anchored in the action-packed realism of the revenge plot, carefully interwoven into the mythic quality of the Gawain plot. Ride South to Purgatory is his first foray into the Western novel, and it is indeed a success. Work is not only a scholar of western American and other liter atures, but an accomplished editor and essayist. The dangers con tinue in this relatively strange environment, but the hero, obviously, must sur vive and return to his homeland victoriously, bringing with him new knowl edge or something more tangible.
Each formula requires a dangerous journey into unknown territory. The heroes of both the Arthurian myth and the Western cowboy myth are formulaic and, though different in some respects, are similar in others. There’s the other plot dealing with Pasque’s desire for revenge against the murderers of his brothers. 1 S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 legends and Sir Gawain should sound in the mind like the end of Tchaikovsky’s “ 1812 Overture.” But that’s not all.
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