Shadow Country (Modern Library Paperbacks)
by Peter Matthiessen
Book Summary Information
Author: Peter MatthiessenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-02
ISBN: 081298062X
Number of pages: 912
Publisher: Modern Library
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780812980622
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Book Reviews of Shadow Country (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Book Review: Payday: an Everglades Western & crime story
Summary: 5 Stars
Matthiessen is one of the most interesting non-fiction writers that I know. I say this on the basis of the magnificent Snow Leopard and the equally gorgeous Birds of Heaven.
I knew that he has written fiction as well, and I knew that it must be interesting whatever its flaws may be, so I decided to read Shadow Country when it won the National Book Award not so long ago. Then the book spent a while in my shelf, until a review by an AF gave me the final push to actually read it.
The book is a condensed version of a trilogy. What we have now is one book with three parts: Part 1 is the ambiguous story of the killing of Ed Watson by his neighbors (was it premeditated murder? or justified self defense by a group of legitimate citizen arresters who were trying to apprehend a mass murderer?)
Part 2 is the dead man's son trying to figure out, much later, what had really happened. Son Lucius Watson has become a historian who digs out the past. We learn some facts, but do they help anybody?
In part 3 we go back to Ed Watson and hear his life story in his own words. This goes back to civil war times and reconstruction in South Carolina, and then to Arkansas and Oklahoma, and finally to Florida, which is the epicenter of this whole story.
I took it with me on a trip in SE-Asia. It is a rather heavy load, but then it takes some time and is not easily dismissed, so it serves well as a travel companion. I have come to like fat novels for longer trips. A few months ago I took Patrick White's Voss to Australia (owls to Athens, right?) and guess what: Voss and Shadow Country have one striking thing in common: the appearance of Halley's Comet! As the comet did in Voss in 1835, it does here in 1910: serve as hindsight prophet. Narrators in Matthiessen's pioneer novel are twisting and turning around the meanings of the appearance just as much as Voss did.
The themes of the novel are nature's degradation by man, the obliteration of wilderness, and man's injustice towards the poor of his own species, especially concerning indigenous peoples and the descendants of slaves. One can also read it as a very long meditation on the meaning of truth.
Most of the story is set in the Everglades during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Protagonists are pioneers, slaves, freedmen, deserters, outlaws, other fugitives, racial mixtures in all variations. People fish, hunt, grow cane and vegetables for a living, raise cattle further north, and become historians, bankers and real estate lawyers when civilization creeps in. Shooting birds for plumes and robbing Indian burial grounds are other respectable professions in earlier times, until much hated national park laws are implemented.
Main character is E.J.Watson, who gets killed upfront in the Prologue set in 2010, so as to remove all doubt and focus the suspense on the why rather than the what. Watson was a leader type, a pioneer, not just an aimless drifter like most others, a patriarch with many women and multiple offspring, a dangerous man with gun and knife. He collects nicknames: the Barber after shooting off a man's moustache tip; the Emperor for his way of establishing his island kingdom; when he is dead he becomes Bloody Watson.
Why did he get killed by his neighbors? Was he a mass murderer, maybe a serial killer? Is there a basis to the rumor of `Watson's Payday'? This means that the man was suspected to kill his laborers rather than pay them.
The story of the killing of Watson is told by multiple narrators in a mosaic of short chapters, jumping back and forth in time. This device is not used for the purpose of obfuscation; rather one sometimes feels that PM is making things a trifle too clear. He likes to rub our noses in his messages sometimes, which makes me make a mental star deduction.
The time of the story is defined politically and historically: we have the emergence of the United States as an empire during the Spanish War. Cuba and the Phillypeens do more for national cohesion than I had realized. Floridians suddenly cheer the Rough Riders and Stars and Stripes. Our anti-hero himself is infused with the spirit of new times.
Other sign posts of the times are references to Jim Crow and the lynching epidemics of the time, and also the fight for women's suffrage. A huge hurricane of 1910 plays a role in the plot. The comet of 2010 is used as a harbinger of evil --- but is the murder of Watson not rather a good thing, all considered?
His son Lucius does not think so, and after many years of painful inactivity and procrastination he finally gets to the job of researching the truth.
Did the novel have to be so long? There are moments and passages where I doubt it. But I stick to my 5 stars for overall value. PM's forte is nature and then also his sketches of racial relations; some of the scenes woven into the huge narrative carpet would provide superb short stories.
I think all in all I would prefer to read the longer text in 3 volumes, and I suspect that I would like volume 3 best, due to its broader scope and more conventional straight narrative, i.e. E.J. Watson's life story told by himself. You have a classic `unreliable' narrator, a man interested in looking better to the world, a man much given to self-pity, but also a man with some decent instincts about the world that he lived it.
Not all the many characters of the plot come out as individuals. It could not be different in such a broad canvas, but keeping the many names apart is a challenge.
Frankly speaking, the crime investigation parts of the tale are a little tedious. I bet they could have been shortened further. Probably nobody dared to tell PM that. After all he has already chucked off 400 pages from the trilogy.
An effort well worth my time, but I advise all readers who look for light amusement to stay far away from this book. The book is not uplifting, has little optimism to share, and does not sing the greater glory of America. All cultural Stalinists of the American variation will be heavily disappointed.
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