Show and Tell, or Seduction not Instruction

While I labour away on Chapter 4 of my thesis I'm not getting much reading done. But here's a brilliant critique by my old writing tutor, Alex Keegan. Alex taught me pretty much everything I know about creative writing. He's a hard taskmaster - to say the least - but he knows his stuff inside out. Here he is analysing a piece from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by my favourite writer, Carson McCullers, in an article posted over on his own blog.

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Tell Me, Is It Show by Alex Keegan

The whole piece is "told" to us (using told in the lay sense of the word) but is it TELL in the literary sense of the word?

Here it is:

That autumn was a happy time. The crops around the countryside were good, and over at the Forks Falls market the price of tobacco held firm that year. After the long hot summer the first cool days had a clean bright sweetness. Goldenrod grew along the dusty roads and the sugar cane was ripe and purple. The bus came each day from Cheehaw to carry off a few of the younger children to the consolidated school to get an education. Boys hunted foxes in the pinewoods, winter quilts were aired out on wash-lines, and sweet potatoes bedded in the ground with straw against the colder months to come. In the evning, delicate shreds of smoke rose from the chimneys, and the room was round and orange in the autumn sky. There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall. Sometimes, late in the night when there was no wind, there could be heard in the town the thin wild whistle of the trainthat goes through Society City on its way far off to the North.

Let's see. Please note this is on the fly, not some academic essay spread over days.

That autumn was a happy time.
This isn't "It was autumn and everyone was happy." For me there's a voice here and lots unsaid. We have to expand on the minimum, see red-faced wifes talking over fences, kids with hoops.

The crops around the countryside were good, and over at the Forks Falls market the price of tobacco held firm that year.
Why "good" and not a more specific word?

IMO it's a narrator's voice, the town voice. Forks Falls, OTOH is a specifc name, definite, but we actually are told nothing. We have to imagine some place with a cute name, imagine a market.

And what does the price line tell us?

It tells us that some years the price falls or crashes. We have to work that out. It's in the shadow of the words.

After the long hot summer the first cool days had a clean bright sweetness.
The first is maybe stockish these days, but it might have been original then, but "long, hot, summer," faintly poetic, representative of a type of summer.

IMO we go to our databanks and think, "summer, hot, not short, this one, ah-hah." It's not REALLY described, is it? WE decide what a long hot summer is. The first cool days (the same) and the end is actual poetry, the words are not LITERAL.

Days aren't clean or sweet. And look:

After the long hot summer
the first cool days
had a clean bright
sweetness

It's poetry.

Goldenrod grew along the dusty roads and the sugar cane was ripe and purple.
Again, evocative but open for our interpretation.

As the previous sentence, it starts relatively plainly but is "open" and moves into near-poetry. I can imagine a negro worker of the day singing and the sugar cane was ripe and purple.

The bus came each day from Cheehaw to carry off a few of the younger children to the consolidated school to get an education.
Ah-hah, a nice picture but it's more than that.

We have the lovely name Cheehaw (specifics again, but just a name. We have to paint our own picture.) Then it's not just "the school bus arrived." We have "carried off" (not accidental).

Have you ever thought of the yellow school bus in the city "carrying off" the kids?

It's voice and attitude, it's indirect speech representing the town's way of seeing. And notice A FEW of the younger kids showing us when we think about it that a lot miss school.

And the ending. Surely "to get an education" is redundant?

But this is a brilliant author, so why have it? It's that old straw-chewing guy saying it, or the bar-keep, someone. It's what any/all/one local would say.

Boys hunted foxes in the pinewoods, winter quilts were aired out on wash-lines, and sweet potatoes bedded in the ground with straw against the colder months to come.
Very evocative, and though it's a statement it requires the reader to expand and "see" or imagine the boys, their dress, their manner.

The quilts clause is lovely, a beautiful direction to see the scene (but we have to draw it)... the sweet potatoes line is something we can see, imagine, but it also foreshadows the longer slower times coming.

In the evening, delicate shreds of smoke rose from the chimneys, and the moon was round and orange in the autumn sky.
The cadence her, the rhythms, ALONE evoke a feeling (I mean if they were UMMS) and they add to the poetry.

Try moving "in the evening" further into the sentence and it clangs like a cracked bell. And smoke as "delicate shreds" is not just evocative, but fresh, special, making us think differently the last third - the MOON - is lovely.

Interestingly I keep looking for a two syllable extra word before autumn:

In the evening,
delicate shreds of smoke rose from the chimneys,
and the moon was round and orange in the uh-uh autumn sky.

Doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong here. The point is the author is making me sing the words not flatly read them.

It's prose poetry and the rhythms and feelings are part of the whole experience. The extra is the rightness, the earthy specialness she's evoking, like the "Hovis Ad" in the UK.

There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
How beautiful is that? What a sentence! It's far more than the semantcs, the bare meaning

There is no stillness like the quiet
of the first cold nights in the fall.

POETRY!!

and it finishes good enough to make me want to cry

Sometimes, late in the night when there was no wind, there could be heard in the town the thin wild whistle of the train that goes through Society City on its way far off to the North.

Sometimes, late in the night when there was no wind,
there could be heard in the town
the thin wild whistle of the train that goes
through Society City on its way far off to the North.

Almost a poem again

I can hear the train and the last line is the train's clatter.

The author gives us WILD whistle, not "shrill" or "loud" but a fabulous evocative word, and the whole paragraph fairly REEKS of atmosphere.

If I had six pictures amd one was of this town I think you'd pick it.

It has "THE ACHE", close to poetry, evocative throughout, the sounds and rhythms and implications mean we know or feel or sense or intuit far more than the bare words.

One great trick to distinguish between show and tell is to write a factual report of what you know with more or less certainty from a passage, what you feel you know or feels probable, what you think is likely.

If you get considerably more than a computer rendering of the original facts then it's show. I would say this is 100% show, and very very good at it, near-poetic

Richie Havens

The 1960s folk revival, following on from the revivals of the 40s and 50s, introduced a staggering array of wholly individualistic talents, people like Odetta, Ramblin Jack Elliott, even Leonard Cohen and Mister Z, who went on to more mainstream success. And alongside them was the high-flying genius, Richie Havens. I've never seen anyone play a guitar like him. It was mesmerising. So was that voice.

Richie Havens has just died, aged 72.

I've always loved this recording, because the groovy 1960s camera work and lighting just seem to complement Richie's guitar style so well.

Farewell Hilda

All That I Have by Castle Freeman

All that I Have by Castle Freeman is a light comedy thriller with a plot crying out for a movie adaptation and a laconic narrator who is immediately engaging in a gruff, maverick-with-a-heart-of-gold sort of way. It’s good fun, a finely written diversion.

The novel begins with an incident that sets the tone: a man of Russian descent is found naked and badly battered and tied to a tree. You can write this in two ways: seriously, as drama, or for laughs. Here, it’s predominantly the latter. What unfolds is a mystery involving Russian mafioso unaccountably holed up in rural Vermont, and a local tearaway for whom our sheriff narrator appears, for reasons not initially explained, to have something of a soft spot. Wing is Sheriff Bell from No Country for Old Men without the ponderous religiosity and with a shade more ability. As the drama unfolds he is determined not to let things get out of hand, both in the investigation and in his private life. Circumstances conspire to make these aspirations increasingly difficult to achieve, but he perseveres with dogged determination and good nature. All of this is told with some brio, and the narrative rattles along at a fine pace, the short chapters pitching up one after the other in furious combination.

It’s good stuff, very enjoyable. It’s probably more than this, however: and for that, we must thank the central character, Sheriff Wing. He is a fascinating creation, possessed of a philosophy of life and, in particular, crime management, which is singular to say the least, but which is still rendered in a credible way. I could believe in a Sheriff Wing whose approach to dealing with crime is to “hold back and a thing develop”. I could believe in a Sheriff who contemptuously dismisses the democratic process behind his election to office by suggesting that - for very good reason - people getting onto an airliner don’t hold an election to decide which of them is going to be pilot, but rather rely on the one who is actually trained to fulfil the role. Wing is a man who knows his abilities and, more importantly, his limitations.

All That I Have is a short book, best taken in one reading. It works on a number of levels and is definitely worth a read.

Most challenged books 2012

Every year the American Library Association compiles its list of the most challenged books in American libraries - those books which librarians are most often called on to ban. This year's list is:

Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey (offensive language, unsuited for age group)
“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie (offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group)
“Thirteen Reasons Why,” by Jay Asher (drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group)
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E. L. James (offensive language, sexually explicit)
“And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell (homosexuality, unsuited for age group)
“The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini (homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit)
“Looking for Alaska,” by John Green (offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group)
Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz (unsuited for age group, violence)
“The Glass Castle,” by Jeannette Walls (offensive language, sexually explicit)
“Beloved,” by Toni Morrison (sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence)

This isn't quite as depressing a list as usual, although it is pretty depressing. In the past we've had Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple on the list. All of them presumably complained about by people who didn't understand a word of them.

The Scapeweed Goat by Frank Schaefer

I read The Scapeweed Goat over 20 years ago, when it first came out in the UK. I remember absolutely loving it but, apart from it being set in rural America and being decidedly strange, I could recall none of its details before picking it up again. I’m glad to have re-read it but, if I’m being honest, I think my original assessment of the novel may have been a touch inflated. It’s definitely strange and it explores some fascinating territory but, in the end, it all seems a bit flat. It seems to fall between two stools, too strange to be a straightforward historical narrative but not weird enough to be a fantasy. It’s an allegory, and it’s essential that allegory grips you simultaneously by its narrative and allegorical strands. I know my younger self was so gripped. My gnarled old grumpy self couldn’t quite sustain the interest on both levels.

On a personal level, what I find very peculiar is that the subject content of this novel is precisely the material which currently interests me, and has done for a number of years. We’re talking civilisation and barbarism, the nature of humanity, the role of religion, man as primitive savage or as subject of an unknowable deity, the place of good and evil in our psyches and in our lives. Now, while those subjects are what interest me now, I would swear that back in 1990, when I first read this novel, those were not particularly topics which would have set my pulse racing. Perhaps I’m wrong. I certainly first read Rousseau when I was a teenager so perhaps these have always been my interests. Nonetheless, I would say it’s undoubtedly true that they appeal more to my older self than my younger.

So what of the novel? It’s a first person narrative, told by an elderly man known only as J, who is holed up in a cabin in the mountains during a particularly violent winter, looking back on his early life and, in particular, a calamitous set of events which informed the passage of his later years. He is an engaging narrator, at first apparently somewhat curmudgeonly but clearly practical and in control. Gradually, one begins to wonder about his sanity. His constant discussions with his pet mouse, for one thing, arouse suspicion, as does his almost insane detestation of the “gluttons", the wild animals which appear to patrol outside his cabin in search of food and against which he engages in an increasingly demented battle.

In his reminiscences, he returns to the 1840s wild frontier of his youth, when he set off westward with his new wife to found a homestead. They move into a fine place and begin to set up home but their life is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a strange-looking and -sounding man, David, who has an otherworldly presence. So begins a nightmare in which J proceeds to lose everything. David is an escapee from a religious sect which has colonised a huge swathe of wild land in a valley to the west. Pilgrims from Britian, four generations before they founded their own society, shunning the sullied ways of all outsiders. Gradually, their insular society takes on the trappings of a cult, establishing its own gods and rituals. It is called New Rousseau, and the inhabitants are the Noble Savages. Clearly, then, we’re examining the possibility of the return to Rousseau’s ideal of the primitive nobility of our pre-civilisation state of savagery. And just as Rousseau himself explained, such a return is impossible. They become savage, for sure, but there is nothing noble about it. On the contrary, their rituals becoming increasingly barbaric, culminating in human sacrifice. David, born into the sect’s aristocracy, nonetheless deprecates the horrors of their cultish ways and effects his escape. That escape brings terror to J and his wife, K.

Does it work as a novel? Not quite, not completely, although it remains an interesting read. It doesn’t quite grip enough as a thriller – it’s all a bit obvious, in truth, a bit unilinear, with little doubt as to the outcome in either narrative strand. And twin-track timescales are always difficult to pull off, particularly in a novel where the aim is to maintain narrative tension: the result of the changes in timeframe is inevitably to reduce the level of tension. And finally, and most importantly, the allegorical content is not quite intriguing enough to sustain interest. The Rousseauian nightmare is too complete, and it emerges too quickly and too completely to truly draw the reader in. It lacks subtlety. Yes, it gives us an analysis of the dangers of fanaticism, but its analysis is almost cartoonish in its lack of complexity.

Overall, The Scapeweed Goat is worth reading, but perhaps not worth lingering long over.

Rejoice

Google blogger

Are Google trying to kill Blogger?

Basically, it seems to be getting clunkier by the month. They've already killed off Google Reader, which was one of the most useful things on the net as far as I was concerned. And Blogger is becoming tiresome to use.

For ages now, I've had to put my own HTML formatting in for line or paragraph breaks, otherwise everything appears in a continuous sprawl of words. Now, I'm having to insert my own HTML to embed photos in the text. Before, I could just say whether I wanted it aligned left, right or middle. Now it defaults to middle, which looks ugly and clumsy, so I have to go in and manually adjust the HTML to get it the way I want. Isn't the point of product refinement that they get gradually better, not progressively worse?

I'm thinking about moving onto another platform. I want to change the name of the blog anyway, away from Tom Conoboy, which is my creative writing pen-name. When I started writing this blog, it was purely devoted to my creative writing, but now it's pretty much entirely devoted to my reading and criticism, so I want to reflect that.

Anyone any recommendations for other blog hosts? And is it possible to transfer existing material from here to a new host?

Understanding where our interests come from

I've just re-read Frank Schaefer's The Scapeweed Goat (review to follow), which I first read more than 20 years ago. Actually, I imagine it was in 1991. That is when the UK paperback was published, and at that time I was a stock librarian, part of whose job was to read new books as they were published. Hell of a job eh? And I gave it up....

Anyway, I remembered absolutely nothing of the novel, except that it was set in rural America and I loved it. Absolutely none of the plot stayed with me.

Having re-read it, I'm fairly astonished by the subject matter. It's pretty much everything that I'm currently interested in - the role of religion in society, the nature of evil, whether it is inherent in humanity, the possibility or otherwise of a Rousseauian escape to the past. There are even "noble savages" in it (Rousseau's term) and the society they found is called New Rousseau.

What I find remarkable is that, in 1991, I would have sworn I had no particular interest in those subject areas. I would argue till I'm blue in the face that my interest in these matters has emerged over the past 10 years at most, six or seven more likely. And yet, here is this novel that I remember reading voraciously, and it deals with precisely these matters.

Now the question is, I suppose, was it this book which, unknown to me, actually fed my interest in the subject matter, so that it emerged more fully in years to come? Or is it that you are always pretty much preoccupied with the same things, but it's just that it takes a while for them to coalesce in your thinking? Did The Scapeweed Goat establish my interest in the subject, or did it just pique what was already there?

Most popular posts

While messing about because my man-flu leaves me incapable of doing anything useful, I came across the Google list of the most popular pages on this blog. They make interesting reading:

Racism in Heart of darkness 2810 hits
Scotland by Alastair Reid 2069 hits
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy 1697 hits
Sanctuary by William Faulkner 1178 hits
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath 953 hits
Life of Pi by Yann Martel 895 hits
Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner 845 hits
Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow 814 hits
Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration 809 hits
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse 790 hits

I'm not surprised by number one on the list. It's my bugbear at the start of every academic year, kids googling "racism in Heart of Darkness". Chinua Achebe, who died last week, is simply wrong to state that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, and I hate the fact that generations of students are being taught this masterpiece almost solely, it seems, in terms of whether or not it is racist.

Scotland is a poem by Alastair Reid which is linked to quite regularly from Facebook and other groups, so I'm not surprised by that one either. Suttree is clearly the most popular of my reviews of Cormac McCarthy, which does surprise me somewhat. I would have expected the Border Trilogy or Blood Meridian to be more searched for. Two Wiliam Faulkners on the list is very interesting. I had supposed Faulkner was falling out of fashion, but perhaps I'm wrong.

I can see why The Bell Jar is popular. Plath remains a cult author and, of course, it has recently been the fiftieth anniversary of her suicide so she's been in the news. And it's a brilliant novel, so I'm pleased people are reading it. I imagine most searchers for Life of Pi are looking for the recent film, rather than the novel. Homer and Langley is an interesting one. For some reason, I get a lot of hits from French readers looking for "Homer et Langley". I don't know why the story of these two Americans should be so popular in France. Anyone know?

Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration was an exhibition in Amsterdam. I don't know why that one should be so searched for. Finally, we have Steppenwolf. Again, I would have thought that Hesse was largely out of favour, and I'm surprised to see so many people searching for him.

Altogether, an interesting list. And there are notable omissions too. I've written about Roth, Updike, Marilynne Robinson and others on here. Perhaps it's just that there is so much already written about them that people don't find their way to this particular, obscure part of the internet.

One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash

One of the few advantages of finally succumbing to the winter virus that has been circulating round my workplace since November, striking down everyone in turn, is that I’m too fuzzy-headed for my thesis research so have to fall back on the delights of pleasure reading. And so on to another Ron Rash acquisition from my recent soujourn in Kentucky. I’ve read most of Rash’s fiction now, but One Foot in Eden, the one I’ve come to last, is actually his first novel. What a first novel, what a talent.

Where to locate this? When I’ve written about Ron Rash before, I’ve labelled him a “southern” writer, and he is. The southern preoccupations are there: family, progress, agrarianism, the advent of technology, change, loss of connection with the past. All of those themes are threaded through his work: the vicious Serena unsettling the old ways in Serena (soon to be a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), the environmentalist backdrop to Saints at the River, the pernicious memories of the Civil War in The World Made Straight, all of them have strong southern undertones. And the language, and the careful depiction of nature and landscape and our place within it, again these are classic southern tropes. So in a sense, yes, it’s fair to say Ron Rash is a southern writer. But then again.

I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough about southern writing to compile a sustained argument here, but there feels like there is a different dynamic at play here. Rash is from the Carolinas, from mountain country and, while many of the preoccupations and the conservative outlook of Appalachia and what you might call the deep south are undoubtedly similar, there is a different texture to them. Perhaps what I mean is that there is less certainty about Appalachian outlooks, less dogmatism, and maybe even a sense that things might just be bad because they’re bad, not because brute progress is making them that way. The Appalachian God, too, seems less punishing than the deep southern God of Flannery et al. There is less horrified certainty to their outlook.

But what of One Foot in Eden? This is a deeply impressive piece of writing, particularly given that it’s a first novel. There’s a confidence about it that is remarkable. Will Alexander is the local sheriff in a small South Carolina town in the 1950s, a period of drastic change. The backdrop of the novel is typically southern, with the imminent flooding of the Jocassee valley to create the new Carolina Power Jocassee Dam. Thus, we have the southern preoccupation with the relentless march of progress and the loss of connection with the past. This is brought dramatically to life with the horrifying descriptions of the way the local graveyards are dealt with by the authorities: the graves cannot be left intact, and not only for sentimental reasons: the coffins, filled as they are with oxygen, will break loose and eventually rise to the surface.

The key dramatic incident in the novel is the disappearance of Holland Winchester, a veteran of the Korean conflict and a typically combative, truculent southern misfit. His mother tells Sheriff Alexander that Holland has been murdered by neighbour Billy Holcombe because he has been having an affair with Billy’s wife, Amy. The rest of the novel is relayed in turn by the sheriff, Amy, Billy and, years later, by Billy and Amy’s son, and finally by the deputy sheriff. It is a murder mystery of sorts, although there is little mystery about whodunnit, so much as howdunnit. What we have, then, is an analysis of human nature and the complex, almost impossible inter-relationship of human beings with their disparate impulses and ambitions and fears and concerns. It is beautifully handled: such a stylistically distinct novel, told in different segments from the points of view of different characters, can be difficult to pull off naturally. Too often, such experiments feel exactly like that – experiments in voice and structure, rather than an organic story. But this is genuinely a story, and a riveting read at that. Through hearing the same events told from the conflicting points of views of each of the protagonists the reader obtains a far deeper understanding of the chronology which surrounded the tragedy. In a conventional narrative, one imagines an author would be forced to revert to all sorts of “show and tell” convolutions in order to get inside the heads of those characters who do not form the substantive point of view. Such techniques become very wearying after a while, and the lack of artifice in this novel is refreshing indeed.

If I have a quibble with the novel, it is probably the subplot featuring the old, witch-like Widow Glendower. She is an outcast, someone mistrusted, disliked and feared by the community, but a throwback to previous generations who possesses a healer’s knowledge of the old natural potions and treatments which served before the advent of modern medicine. I can see how she fits into the novel, I understand she is symbolic of the difficulty of communication and the danger of progress and the place for tradition. I see that. But nonetheless that whole subplot feels engineered and inorganic to me. It is not of a piece with the rest of the plot, which benefits greatly from its narrative tightness. It feels like it has been included to permit the – admittedly impressive – scene right at the end, years later, when her coffin is exposed by the works to flood the valley.

But whatever, this is a very fine piece of novel writing. It is mystifying why Rash isn't better known.

Marilynne Robinson on reading and writing

Interesting brief interview with Marilynne Robinson on the New York Times website.

Does she re-read, she is asked: "I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it", she says. I have to say that's such a Calvinist outlook and although I try to fight against the Calvinist instinct within me, damn it but I can't help but associate with it.

If you could meet any character from literature, she is asked, who would it be? Her response is "Ishmael". That seems a very odd choice, I have to say. Ishmael is one of the oddest narrators in literary history: he literally expunges himself from the text for long passages, as though he weren't there. Cormac McCarthy does much the same thing with the kid in Blood Meridian. Over long passages of the novel, particularly the very gory ones, the kid simply disappears from the text. McCarthy is doing this deliberately, and so does Melville when he elides Ishmael from the action. In both instances, the authors are seeking to distance the characters from the unseemly, at times inhuman acts unfolding in the narrative. These characters, then, are witnesses to events but not necessarily complicit in them. This has always seemed something of a cop-out to me, and it seems vaguely unCalvinist of Robinson to elevate Ishmael in this way.

The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

I was introduced to Ron Rash by a regular reader on this blog and have consistently been pleased to have had that introduction. Rash is a fine writer who one day is going to write something truly stunning.

The World Made Straight is a fairly straightforward narrative, a character driven coming-of-age novel in which a number of traps are set for our adolescent main character to stumble into – literally so, in the novel’s excruciating opening, when he steps into a bear trap. He has discovered an illegal field of marijuana and returns twice to harvest it to make some easy money. The third visit leads to his fateful encounter with the trap. The young man, Travis Shelton, is a troubled but essentially decent high school drop-out, someone who feels the need to rebel without necessarily having any particular cause. The aftermath of the bear trap incident gives him a cause, however, in the form of a serious rift with his father which causes him to leave home and live with another drop-out, the disgraced teacher Leonard Shuler who is now operating as a drug and moonshine dealer to the youth of the community.

A bare description of the plot and characters wouldn’t do the novel justice. It would make it appear slight, cliched and predictable, with characters out of central casting and a too straightforward unfurling of the plot elements. To an extent, these would be justified criticisms, but overall such an analysis would seem unfair. There is a depth to the novel which isn’t immediately apparent but which resonates much longer than would be the case with cheaper novelistic fare. And, as ever, with southern fiction (Rash almost fits into that category, certainly in sentiment, if not necessarily in precise geographic location) the underlying theme revolves around time and history and the ties that bind us and the difficulty of the past.

In some ways it is too pat. The two central characters, a generation apart, are kindred spirits. The elder, Leonard, sees in Travis a chance to atone for the mistakes in his own life by ensuring the young man pursues his education and escapes the stultifying fate that otherwise awaits him. One could get away with that as a basic premise, but for them each to be descendents of participants on different sides of the Civil War, participants who came to blows in a particularly unsavoury incident, begins to establish a backstory that feels suspiciously manufactured. And just at the moment of his crisis, Travis finds himself a girlfriend who is, depending on your viewpoint, a steadying influence or a controlling restraint. The tension this provides, of course, ensures a suitable narrative propulsion, but there is perhaps a worry of writing-by-numbers here. One can imagine a writer wanting to create a character like Travis and wondering how to reveal his fears about independence and constraint: a girlfriend, natch, one who wants to do the best for him but whose ministrations can be taken by Travis as being controlling. And something will have to propel the final crisis which leads to the novel’s climax: step forward the inflexible father character, someone whose love Travis craves but whose upbringing cannot allow him to unbend and show affection to his son. There is a lack of naturalness about the plot, then, and it is exacerbated by the not wholly convincing subplot about the Civil War atrocity which brings the latter-day descendents together in unpredictable ways.

All of this sounds faintly damning, and yet I think this is a good novel, containing some very fine writing. I seem to recall having to make very similar clarifications in earlier reviews of Ron Rash. Furthermore, I started this review by saying one day he will write something brilliant, and I feel fairly sure I’ve said the same thing before. The reason is that Rash is a brilliant conjurer of words but he doesn’t, as yet, seem able to marshall a wholly convincing plot. My feeling is that he tries too hard. His writing has the feel, to me, of someone who plots everything in detail before he begins. This has the effect of straightjacketing the narrative when his writing demands that it should fly free.

What would be truly fascinating would be to rewrite this story without the character of Leonard, or without the requisite bad guy, Carlton Toomey, or without Travis’s girlfriend. Each of these feels too carefully defined in order to propel Travis towards his crisis. Each of them, in isolation, might work, but en masse they feel like a manufactured supporting cast. Life tells us that crises usually emerge anyway, so Travis would at some stage have encountered the difficulties he does in this novel without these people. Perhaps he could have done so in a more naturalistic way, which could have created a novel of outstanding quality because Rash’s writing, as opposed to his plotting, is itself beautifully naturalistic. His grasp of description and mood is exemplary and if this can be allied to better plotting and characterisation Ron Rash is capable of producing a masterpiece.