A curse through the generations
Feted for his Iraq war debut, a writer takes on another bloody era in US history.
Kevin Powers’ new novel is a followup to his prize-winning 2012 debut The Yellow Birds, which drew on the two years he spent fighting as a US soldier in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq. His examination of extreme violence continues, as he lays out his portrayal of George Seldom, a man born out of the mayhem and brutality of the American Civil War and the slave trade.
The novel begins as Emily Reid, a muleskinner’s daughter, is amusing herself by setting a dog on Rawls, the young son of the slave woman owned by her father. Rawls, we later learn, hobbles because his previous owner cut off his two big toes to stop him running away, and after doing so, hung the boy upside down from a fence for a day.
One of the most interesting features of Powers’ writing is his familiarity with killing; he has witnessed it, and he insists on its place and significance in his story. This is a very unsentimental account of American history, and Powers, intent, it seems, on sparing his readers nothing, is at pains to portray a nation created out of a barbarity that still resonates today.
Casual cruelty and horrendous murders are portrayed alongside lush descriptions of nature and weather, and Powers employs the shock juxtapositions at every point: “The sky as red now as a slaughterhouse floor.” Chance encounters explode into savagery – there are so many atrocities they become expected – and the body count is shockingly high.
Emily Reid and her father live near the Beauvais Plantation, owned by Antony Levallois, a character who reaches such heights of evil he stands out even in the context of social upheaval and war. He is a lordly, Machiavellian killer, who not only trades in slaves, but also rapes and inventively torments them.
His sadism is a stain that affects all around him, a curse that will spread through generations. Levallois is so villainous he comes to seem emblematic, a symbol of the dark fissure in the American project, the greatest nation in the world built on subjugation, bloodletting and rape. Reflecting on the bloodshed, an army colonel wonders whether mankind might be by nature immune to order.
The action shifts from the time before George Seldom’s birth to the 1950s, where George, now 90 and hoping to revisit scenes of his early life, meets a woman called Lottie. George moves through a country less violent yet still regulated by racism, with segregation in force. Powers goes further forward in time, his narrative fraying somewhat with an account of Lottie and her army-veteran partner that includes a formulaic dialogue between two ex-soldiers.
There’s a lot to admire in the writer’s vivid prose, his striking portrayal of landscape, and his fearless will to shock and confront. In the grandness of his undertaking, some elements are lost: a close examination of character, also humour. Rawls, Emily and Levallois tend to seem more representative than fully drawn. There’s a rather American tendency to break into ponderous asides, as if the writer, who has been hugely praised for his work on weighty subjects (the psychology of war; the US’s dark soul) is occasionally affecting profundity rather than arriving at it the hard way: building truths out of the raw material of his story.