‘Amawalk Horsehair’s’ characters shine

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AMAWALK HORSEHAIR, by William C. Holden III, Phoenix Publishing, West Kennebunk, 1996, hardcover, 321 pages, $24.50.

Taking off in an airplane sends my heart into my throat.

I shut my eyes, plant my feet and grip the seat as the jet lifts off and sharply climbs upward. The engine’s roar floods my ears. I hear the thud as the landing gear comes up. I listen for the motors’ whirring as the flaps are withdrawn on the trailing edge of the wings and other telltale sounds that everything is going right.

So, for me, a plane flight is always a good test of a book.

On a recent trip involving two flights between Bangor and Chicago, I took along “Amawalk Horsehair,” a self-published book by Maine writer William C. Holden III, to see whether the book would distract me from my fear of flying.

On the first leg of the journey, taking off from Bangor, I clenched the seat’s armrests, listened as usual for the clunk of the landing gear but found myself gradually drawn into Holden’s self-described “novel of intrigue.”

“Amawalk Horsehair” is an intriguing novel. It’s a complex, bizarre tale about a 7-year-old boy who discovers a thick glass plate wrapped in heavy brown paper, bound by twine, amid an old baseball glove, windup train and other items his great-grandfather put in a “Toys for the Poor” box at Christmas in 1949.

The so-called toy turns out to be the world’s most powerful telescope capable of recording images captured at speeds greater than the speed of light. The “proto-lens” had been invented by the boy’s eccentric grandfather in his basement workshop in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

An engineer and naval architect, Grandpa William Hadley is foremost a tinkerer. His grandson tells us he invented the night light, spinning reel and rod, “ChickCue” electric chicken barbecue and other contraptions. But he never made a nickel from most of his inventions, many of which were stolen and patented by conniving Ford Motor Co. engineer Luther Rice.

Benton O. Hadley’s discovery of Grandpa Hadley’s proto-lens launches the boy on a lifelong quest into his grandfather’s past.

As the ailing inventor lies in the hospital, gazing at his old canary, Yellow, in a cage at the foot of his bed, he gives his grandson a cryptic message.

“Amawalk,” the elder Hadley stammers, glaring at 16-year-old Benton, without moving his piercing green eyes. Then after a long pause, the old man says, “Horsehair, Amawalk Horsehair.”

“Amawalk Horsehair” author William C. Holden III shares a lot in common with his novel’s narrator, Benton O. Hadley. Both gave up business careers to raise sheep, pigs and other critters on farms in southern Maine. Both sail ketches to the Caribbean. Both are adventurers — out to live life fully.

“Someone once said, `This is no dress rehearsal. You only get one try,”‘ Holden told the Bangor Daily News in a 1996 interview. “In a lot of ways, that’s how I have led my life.”

Holden divides his time among his sheep farm in the southern Maine village of Goodwins Mills, the island of St. Maarten in the Dutch Antilles, and a bare slip of land in Frenchman Bay.

Two years ago, he acquired Mark Island and its deactivated light tower and lightkeeper’s house. He had eyed the 4-acre isle and wondered what it would be like to inhabit a place so exposed to the elements.

Since then, he has completely refurbished the property but has striven to preserve the light station’s historic character. He saw the windswept island as a place that would fire his imagination and enable him to write the books he has been churning out for several years now.

To date, Holden has written five novels. They include “Eastbound Four,” “Amawalk Horsehair,” “Ipdown Roses,” “God Does Not Cry” and “Flock of Dead Doves.” The books’ plots range widely from a sailing adventure to the discovery of a new comet.

“Amawalk Horsehair” and “Eastbound Four” have been self-published, while his other three novels still await publication.

Holden contracted Phoenix Publishing in West Kennebunk to edit and design his books, and advise him on marketing them. The author is at work on a photo-essay book about life on Mark Island.

Frankly, I was skeptical after receiving “Amawalk Horsehair.” There is a stigma surrounding self-published works. Readers wonder: Maybe the book just didn’t measure up and the author has such a big ego and loads of money, he published it on his own.

Cynically, one wonders, too, whether the writer wasn’t well-connected enough, didn’t know the right people in the publishing world. Maybe the content didn’t have mass appeal.

Warily eyeing “Amawalk Horsehair,” with its fine pen-and-ink illustrations, I spotted some cliches in the sleek, white book jacket, “harrowing suspense, spell-binding, fast-paced” and promptly put it down.

But I gave the novel another chance, and am glad I did.

What I enjoyed most about “Amawalk Horsehair” are the rich, original — often crackpot — characters Holden has had such a good time cooking up.

Take Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner. He’s the German physicist and former Nazi pilot who wears starched white shirts and black wing-tipped shoes, and eats five hot dogs during a 1964 baseball game between the Washington Senators and the Detroit Tigers.

There’s the paranoid, tightly wrapped Tuck Ellis, in old black Keds and a porkpie hat with the brim cut off; Anthony Sacco, dressed up in a lady’s bonnet and high lace-up shoes, rocking on the porch; and the black-booted lout Herman Gunther Krock with his collection of 200 cleavers and butcher knives.

My favorite, though, is Hiram “Tubby” Tublicover-Zen who manages to be lovable and repulsive. He’s a 6-year-old boy who lives in Benton Hadley’s barn.

“Chocolate smeared all over his face and hands, cheeks bulging with a mouthful of M&Ms and pickled eggs; belly hanging out over his dirty shorts, rags around his feet tied with bailing twine, an excuse for shoes,” Hadley tells readers. “I saw his head pop up in back of the old fieldstone wall bordering the barnyard as I rode my favorite pig, Dear Heart, around the pig pen.”

Then there’s the twisted plot. It reminds me a bit of the surreal tales spun by Australia’s Peter Carey or the late Canadian writer Robertson Davies.

Holden delights in jerking the reader forward and backward. The reader wonders what could the fat, psychopathic cook at Hadley’s Boy Scout camp in New York possibly have in common with the mystery man Hot Rod who is wheeled around in a shopping cart back at Tarpaper Acres in Maine.

All the while, Hadley is apologizing, asking the reader to keep the faith as he narrates the complex tale from his 36-foot clipper ketch Northern Light bound for Venezuela.

At times, it’s an act of faith to follow “Amawalk Horsehair.” The reader feels he has set sail on some harebrained adventure and is barely holding onto the boat’s gunwales with his pinkie.

Miraculously, though, the book and its crazy quilt of characters come together in the end. But after such a rough, weird ride, readers are left rubbing their eyes. You almost need to read the book again to get everyone and everything straight.

Maybe that’s not such a bad idea the next time I am high in the sky, gripping the seat, listening for the landing gear, trying to forget my fear of flying.

“Amawalk Horsehair” can be purchased from Bunker Books, P.O. Box 105, Birch Harbor 04613; telephone 963-7099.