Miranda Carroll Reviews Tyler Enfield's Like Rum-Drunk Angels
Tyler Enfield. Like Rum-Drunk Angels. Goose Lane Editions. $22.95, 440 pp., ISBN: 9781773101309
My roommate put the sign “Ropin’, Ridin’, Wranglin’ done here” on her bedroom door. A bookstore owner might also consider placing this same sign on the shelf above Like Rum-Drunk Angels, Tyler Enfield’s latest novel. There is a current niche fascination among some young people with the fictions of the ‘Wild West,’ attracting us to these signs, cowboy hats, and even cowboy emojis. Enfield understands and captures this alluring and romantically remote cowboy country in his comedic novel.
Readers won’t be surprised that Enfield, originally from California and now living in Edmonton, is also a photographer and filmmaker. Like Rum-Drunk Angels is beautifully cinematic, with surprising story breaks that create a long-lasting controlled suspense. He’s a westerner and knows how to describe a land whose “path climbs a hill, offering views of many more – they rumple this distance like soft waves on a blanket.”
Francis is an intelligent fourteen-year-old living in the town of Nowhere, and he needs money to win the heart of a girl he loves whose name he doesn’t know. She is the daughter of the mayor who insists on her marrying a financially attractive gentleman. To get money, Francis is willing to rob several trains and later, unsuccessfully, a bank. The story charges along as Francis, his brother Samuel and his friend Ned, join the legendary outlaw and dynamite artist Bob Temple. The gang call themselves the Blackstone Templars and after several train hits, they become celebrity bandits. People wish to be robbed by them, and trains prepare for the possibility of being hijacked by the infamous Blackstone Templars.
The leader of the gang, Temple, is an experienced outlaw in the midst of an existential crisis, and Like Rum-Drunk Angels represents his last ride. Temple confronts his aging and takes stock of his life while on the road with Francis and company. This character takes on new meaning when Enfield writes, “Temple’s life and the author’s can’t be so different.” The author intrudes into the narrative as he writes in the voice of Bob Temple expressing their similarities. Temple is cut off before he can reveal the author’s secrets “that he would not want made public,” signaling that this novel is about the author’s life, reflecting on how all novels inevitably reveal secrets of their creators.
Enfield knows and uses the tropes of Wild West fiction expertly. There are gang rivalries, gunslingers, and bank hold-ups. And many lonely cookouts on the High Sierra. However, some of the plot conventions are dated and problematic. Women in the novel seem to have little agency of their own. For example, Francis’s love interest is not given a name during the duration of the adventures and stands as an object rather than a character. Later the gang encounters a mystical Indigenous man possessing sage advice and psychedelic drugs. And again, as with the love interest, the Indigenous character is not named and seems to simply stand as a plot element. Enfield does not work to tear down these stereotypes, but faces them head on with the not always successful intention of comedic irony.
In the wild west of Like Rum-Drunk Angels, Francis, through luck and lawlessness becomes famous, and makes a fortune. There is freedom for Francis in the Sierra even within the tropes of the genre. But as tragedy occurs, the novel becomes more profound as it moves beyond the conventions. The depth of Francis’s character is revealed as he processes the deaths of his brother, his friend, and Lily, a young girl. Francis does not make a dramatic display of emotion, nor does he play the stoic cowboy. He shows his hurt in subtle moments of reflection, telling stories or looking up at stars.
Enfield, whose first books were YA fiction, appeals to the cowboy-loving sensibilities of young people with this novel. Within the genre of Wild West fiction, the author reveals his own secrets and plays with the conventions of his chosen drama. He plays with tropes of the past while adding bits of himself into the narrative. As the Indigenous man says to Francis, “this is our story, yours and mine.” This is Enfield’s story, it’s the story of the genre he references, but it’s our story, too. So, in the end, after all of his adventures, some humorous some tragic, when Francis returns to Nowhere with nothing, we know that he returns with a story, and so do we.
Miranda Carroll is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto majoring in English Literature and Art History. Originally from Hamilton, she now lives in Toronto. In addition to her studies, Miranda writes and illustrates for the Victoria College newspaper and is excited for whatever the future holds.