There’s strong Of Mice and Men energy to the brothers: Landry was a kind of scapegoat on the plantation, beaten insensible for the transgressions of the other enslaved people. He is searching for a monster: “A black coat of fur that clung to the shadows, moving fluidly as if it were part of the darkness itself.” Instead, he meets the two brothers, Prentiss and Landry, recently freed from under the yoke of a villainous neighbour. The novel opens with George Walker, a decent, moral man transplanted to the south from New England, wandering in the woods. There’s strong Of Mice and Men energy to the brothers: Landry was a scapegoat on the plantation, beaten insensible Harris’s novel weaves together two different tales set in the wake of the war – that of a pair of Confederate soldiers whose love for each other must be kept from the prying eyes of the small Georgia town around them, and the story of two formerly enslaved brothers for whom emancipation brings questions as well as opportunities.
Now we have The Sweetness of Water, the sweeping first novel by Nathan Harris, a 29-year-old based in Texas. The Good Lord Bird by James McBride followed an escaped slave in the years leading up to the war. Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End told of a gay couple fighting in first the Indian wars, then the civil war. Only recently have novelists sought to uncover stories that step outside this dominant narrative mode. The subgenre of historical fiction about the American civil war is generally a slightly macho, fusty one, with accuracy privileged over narrative, drawn-out battle scenes over emotional complexity, and a focus on the lives of red-blooded, white-skinned men (and the women who love them) drowning out the experience of others. T he civil war has a central place in American literary history, featuring in novels that achieved global success – think Cold Mountain and Gone With the Wind – and others that were hits in their native land but didn’t translate (Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, EL Doctorow’s The March and The Black Flower by Howard Bahr, to name just a few).
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