Guest review by Yvonne Coppard: AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins, audiobook narrated by Yareli Ariszmendi

 

"The pace and suspense gripped me immediately and didn’t let me go through more than sixteen hours of listening."

Yvonne Coppard is a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and writer of fiction for children and adults. See more on her website.

This is, without question, the best audio book I listened to in 2020, and the best narration. Until recently, I was unaware of the controversy that surrounded its publication and will return to that later. But first, the story.

Lydia, a bookshop owner, lives a comfortable life in Acapulco with her journalist husband, Sebastian, and young son, Luca, surrounded by a large extended family. Lydia forms a platonic friendship with a regular customer, Javier. He is well-read, sensitive, loves poetry and is a charming conversationalist. He is also, as Lydia later discovers to her horror, the head of a powerful drugs cartel, ensuring compliance with terror and unspeakable violence. When Sebastian writes a critical piece exposing Javier, his revenge is swift: he orders the slaughter of the whole family, at a party. Lydia and Luca are the only survivors. It soon becomes clear that Javier knows they are still alive and is determined to hunt them down. The cartel’s networks are wide; Lydia’s attempts to leave the country legally are unsuccessful. Their only chance of survival is to take the route across Mexico to the USA. They must disappear, join the illegal migrants who risk their lives in a perilous journey through the desert, dropping from bridges onto the tops of moving trains.

The characters are complex and convincing; the pace and suspense gripped me immediately and didn’t let me go through more than sixteen hours of listening. The detailed account of one character’s final moments, the hopeless struggle for one last breath, was particularly masterful and will stay with me. American Dirt is not an easy listen; we are taken right to the heart of each scene. Yet there is a coolness in the narrative that is all the more compelling for its lack of dramatic hype or self-pity. Lydia cannot afford the luxury of emotional outpourings; she needs her energy to stay alert and keep moving.

Yareli Arizmendi, a Mexican actor, brings Lydia to life with a voice like warm honey. She reads faultlessly: her tone, pace and rhythm match the action as it unfolds. The effect is mesmerising.

Cummins, a Caucasian American, has been accused of appropriation, stereotyping and inaccuracy in some of the details. The controversy marred the publication and led to the inevitable trolling and threats. I’m at a loss to understand why, perhaps because I am Caucasian British and have never really experienced being marginalised or excluded. I’ve certainly never faced terror and violence, or had to flee my home.

Who has the right to tell a story like this? Perhaps those with a more ‘authentic’ voice have been held back by the prevailing bias and barriers that our industry is having to face up to after years of denial and complacency. If so, we must continue that fight - but not, surely, by silencing other voices. Memoir would undoubtedly have more authenticity, but Cummins has written a novel. It’s possible that people who live through these terrifying experiences will not always able, or willing, to re-shape their trauma into authentic fiction. I believe the best writers, whatever their own experience, can tap into a realm of truth that transcends the necessity for empirical evidence. Please, let’s not make it impossible for writers to step outside their own gender, ethnicity, social class or experience, especially when they can deliver like this.

American Dirt is published by Tinder Press.

Guest review by Wes Magee: BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

"It is a fine achievement to blend the blood-saturated brutality of the humans with the raw beauty of the natural world. McCarthy makes it work, seamlessly."

Wes Magee is a former headteacher who has been a full-time author since 1990. He has published more than a hundred books for children - poetry, fiction, plays, and picture books - and seven collections of poems for adults.

No Man’s Land (Blackstaff) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and The Very Best of Wes Magee (Macmillan) won The Children’s Poetry Bookshelf Award.

Towards the end of the most recent ice age, between 15,000 and 10,000 years BC, a land bridge existed between north-east Asia and Alaska. The bridge, which now lies beneath the Bering Strait, probably facilitated the slow migration of nomadic hunter-gatherers into the American continent, people eventually spreading down the eastern seaboard as far as the southern tip of Chile. Others spread east, possibly joining with Europeans who had trekked over the extended Arctic ice shelf.

In 1492 AD Christopher Columbus’s expedition across the Atlantic made landfall at a Caribbean island. Thinking he had discovered a west route to the East Indies, Columbus named the tribal people he encountered ‘Indians’ (Spanish: indios). The name stuck. More than a century on, European travellers, often fleeing religious persecution at home, established settlements in The New World at Jamestown in 1607, and later at Plymouth - the Pilgrim Fathers. From the start there was serious conflict with the indigenous ‘Indians’. Two very different cultures were on collision course.

So began more than two centuries of war-like strife between the technologically advanced white settlers (they had guns) and the Native Americans who relied on the bow and arrow, lance and knife: a long-lasting clash between Christians and what were perceived as heathens. The conflict deepened as a growing tide of European immigrants moved further and further west, grabbing land for cattle rearing, and farming, discovering oil, and seeking gold. The Wild West was created, and with it the literature of the western.

As a boy in the 1940s and 50s I devoured the cheap, luridly illustrated, pulp fiction paperbacks telling tales of tough cowboys battling against uncivilised Indians. Hollywood jumped aboard the bandwagon and the western movie became an industry in its own right. Roy Rogers and Trigger ruled the range.

Attitudes to this conflict were slow to change. Novels from Dee Brown’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee  (1970) and through to Peter Cozzens’ The Earth is Weeping (2016) set out to depict the history and the destruction of an indigenous culture from the Indian point of view, and how remorseless white expansionism amounted to nothing less than genocide. The celebrated American novelist Cormac MaCarthy (b. 1933) exemplifies this change of viewpoint, adding significantly to the western genre in a series of outstanding novels, of which Blood Meridian is the strongest.

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, is a tumultuous fiction set around the emerging lawless townships, the stakeholders, and the isolated sod-buster homesteads of western Texas and the Mexican border region in the 1840s. Based on an actual body of disparate, desperate men who terrorised the area, the violent Glanton gang, McCarthy depicts the characters with a Dickens-like gift for their grubbiness and greed, their sleaze. We have Toadville (fugitive, branded face, no ears), Judge Holden (educated, completely hairless, given to philosophical utterances such as ‘War is God’), John Joel Glanton (criminal, gang leader), Grannyrat (criminal), Tobin (ex-priest), and principally an unnamed runaway child known through the book as the boy, then the kid, and finally the man. (The author used a similar literary device in his apocalyptic novel The Road where the main characters are the boy and the man.)

In Blood Meridian the boy escapes a squalid, poverty-stricken, abusive, violent background to become a homeless vagrant in the semi-lawless townships of west Texas where he falls in with the Glanton gang of criminals and fugitives. They earn a living by roving the country seeking out and attacking bands of marauding, vengeful Indians who have pillaged and fired homesteads, murdered, raped and kidnapped. The novel recounts numerous expeditions as the Glantons scour desert, plain, forest, and mountains, hunting Indians (often wearing stolen clothing as trophies) and engaging them in brutal, vicious fighting. The gang then scalp the dead, returning to the townships with the proof of their victories over the ‘savages’. Grateful townspeople welcome them as heroes and pay them in gold. There were then wild days when the drunken Glantons went crazy with debauchery and the smashing-up of property. Anti-social behaviour to the power of 10.

The vivid depiction of man’s violent inhumanity and degradation is but part of the story: Cormac McCarthy gives the reader a marvellous counterpoint through his stunning descriptions of landscape, weather, the night sky, sunrise and sunset. A high-quality lyrical creation of ‘place’. And running throughout, like a motif, are the descriptions of the country’s flora and fauna. It is a fine achievement to blend the blood-saturated brutality of the humans with the raw beauty of the natural world. The author makes it work, seamlessly.

In the end most of the Glanton gang suffer more than wounds from arrow and axe: comeuppance will out. Some die violently: others are hanged in public.

Cormac McCarthy has gifted a powerful and memorable book to the world. The book’s brief epilogue ends with the words ‘Then they all move on again’. It appears to indicate a continuum: and in the same way the townships continued to ‘move on’, to develop and expand long after the infamous Glantons had gone. Townships became cities. And while the Indian tribes and nations continued the fight to hold their lands and preserve their way of life they were eventually defeated at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. It brought to a close the long-running Indian Wars. A culture that had developed from the days when those primitive hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering land bridge while the ice still held its grip, came to an abrupt halt. Its people were confined to designated Indian reservations. The warrior, the bow and arrow, the buffalo were gone. Scalping was over.

Blood Meridian is published by Picador.