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Dramatis personae:
them: Robert E. Lee White, ex-Delta-Force, third-party candidate for U.S. President, whose name cannot possibly be a coincidence; Corey Evers, White's right-hand man, and more; Charles Dufort, the richest man in Mississippi, who has bankrolled White, proud descendent of Southern slaveholders; Charles, his son, a gambler and an addict; Sophie, his daughter, businesswoman; the Bastard Sons of the Confederacy, a mysterious group that is burning down antebellum mansions; Buck Tarlton, Tensaw Co. sheriff, proud descendent of Southern slaveholders; Shotwell Barlow, a militiaman; Donny Kilmer (kill more?), a cold-blooded assassin; racist cops and deputies, trigger-hungry militiamen from Oklahoma.
us: Penn Cage, ageing ex-mayor of Nachez, Mississippi, author, Bienville, Mississippi city attorney; his mother, Peggy, aged 86 years old, who is dying of Multiple Myeloma; Penn's daughter Annie, civil rights attorney; Ezra "Doc" Berry, openly gay Black man, mayor of Bienville; Ray Ransome, ex-con, Doc's fixer; Nadine Sullivan, owner of the bookstore in Bienville; Kendrick Washington, a Black rapper, a bringer of light, whom Annie is sweet on; Andrew McKinney, curator and artist who is making the Penn's historical family plantation into a museum of the slave experience; the members of the city council; the citizens of Bienville.
historical : Captain Pencarrow, plantation owner whose beloved is his slave Calliope; their children Romulus and Niobe, whose bloodline descends to the present generation; Cadmus, Pencarrow's butler and accountant; Evelyn Pencarrow, legitimate white daughter of Pencarrow, who nurses a deep and malignant hatred for Calliope and her children; Frank and Shot Barlow, brothers, owners of the neighboring plantation who bear a hatred for the captain, and whose descendants pollute the present with their carefully nursed hatred.
a mystery : William Faulkner's enormous and ancient southern black bear, who appears from time to time out of mists as old as time to characters in this novel, whose creation lay in the hands of a novelist, and who stands for, perhaps, a history deeper than human history, and a power that is blind to race.
Greg Iles' novel, besides being a murder mystery, is also a thriller, and it may be called a saga as well. It sprawls across centuries and extended families and is tied to landscapes. In its pages, many balls are kept in the air. It does not and cannot pretend to solve human puzzles of race and class, family relatedness, compulsions to love and to kill, and mythologies of grandeur and control, but it does revisit and consider all of these. Only a few of the novel's concerns can be handled here.
The title is from a Neil Young song, which preaches to Southern men and asks when they will relinquish their racist past and identity.
An ageing Penn Cage (the point-of-view character) and his daughter, Annie, watch by the bedside of Penn's dying, yet valiant mother. Upon her passing, Penn learns the details of his ancestry, which includes the blood of slaves held by his progenitors. Penn (and Iles;' readers) learn the details of this inheritance through an interspersed narrative of Civil War times, particularly a moment when perhaps hundreds of slaves were tortured and killed near the Pencarrow Plantation, still held in the present by Penn's family. So: the first mystery (and the first mass murder) is, why were the slaves massacred? Why then? Civil War narrative interspersed unravels this question.
In a kind of atonement, the Pencarrow buildings and land are being turned into a museum dedicated to enshrining the stories of enslaved Africans. The curator is a young man who traces his heritage to those slaves. …which is only one of the reasons, and a symbolic one at that, that the owners of the neighboring plantation boil over with racist and sexist hatred. They have dug a bunker on their land where a trained militia oil their guns and nurse their age-old resentments. To visit a surfeit of grief on the nearby multiracial city, all the militia needs is a leader. The boiling racist hatred is the set-up for the thriller. The thriller, and a number of mysteries, are set up when a powerful leader appears, and the whole morass of emotion lurches forward.
Robert E. Lee (Bobby) White cherishes a vision of himself as president of the United States, no longer controlled by checks and balances. To vault into that office, White polishes a public version of himself, hero of Afghan wars (true), highly educated, handsome, ladykiller, man of depth and reason. In secret, he is homosexual (which is not a crime). In public, the most powerful White women in town audition for the part of First Lady. In secret, White plots with a terrible, hidden power structure beneath the legally elected cultural surface. The white sherif and his posse use a legal precedent to dissolve the town's city council, unseat the mayor, and dissolve the police force (led by a Black police chief). At this moment, the revered Black mayor is found shot to death. Which of the hidden haters pulled the trigger? Thus the second mystery is revealed.
As the town's Black citizens gather in a public park to grieve, Bobby White gives the go-ahead to an assassin he has groomed to kill as many of the mourning citizens in the audience as he can. Meanwhile, Bobby White will use his Delta Force training to kill the assassin, and thus become a culture hero, having stopped a terrible massacre. The voters will stumble over themselves to cast their ballots for White as president (it is, and it is not, a pun).
Throughout the text, Iles has Penn make connections between the unfolding scene in the novel and Donald Trump's presidency, only in this case, Bobby White is so sane, educated, and kind—in public at least. From time to time, Penn sees a gigantic and ancient black bear, who meets as an equal, does not attack, and fades into the undergrowth. If Trump is one bookend to the saga, the bear, his roots in the Pleistocene, in the darkness of forest, is the other bookend.
Reader, to allow you to discover what happens, I leave the rest of the pages to you.
§ Cathy Downs, Prof. Emerita at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, keeps a garden, feeds the cats, designs quilts, and enjoys good books of the mysterious sort.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, May 2024
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