Guest review by Jane Rogers: THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich

 

 "The Sentence of the title has multiple meanings, which go on reverberating right to the end: but I won’t say any more about that. Go read!"

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her latest novel, Body Tourists, is now available in paperback, and reviewed on this blog (see below). For more information, see Jane's website.

Erdrich is the Pulitzer-prize winning author of no less than 17 novels, and I’m ashamed that I haven’t read one of them till now. The Sentence, which was on this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist, has sent me scurrying for her backlist.

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Elements of the novel are clearly rooted in this biography, since most of the action takes place in a similar Minneapolis bookstore, which specialises in books by and about indigenous people. The first person narrator, Tookie, ends up working at the store, and real Minneapolis comes crashing into the narrative when coronavirus hits,  George Floyd is murdered, and the city becomes a war zone.

Tookie is a one off; tough, funny, sarcastic, prickly, thoroughly off the rails (in her early life, at least), and convinced she is unlovable. She reminds me a little of the cranky heroine/narrator of Olga Tokarczuk’s magnificent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. (One of many books which Tookie recommends to the reader.)  Chapter one charts her hilarious route to a ten year stint in prison for stealing a corpse whilst under the influence of various drugs and an unrequited passion for a horribly manipulative woman.

In prison she becomes a reader. The book changes tone and settles down to a steadier kind of story, when she comes out of prison in 2015. There’s a ghost, Flora, with a complex plot which provides the pretext for increasingly strange behaviour on Tookie’s part; there are bookstore friends and colleagues; there is the ever-lovable Pollux, the man who arrested her and eventually marries her; and all these are expertly drawn. But what fascinated me most about the novel was the insider view it gave me of Tookie’s Potawatomi world-view. For her, the veil between the mundane and the supernatural is thin; she is alert to signs and tokens which mean nothing to me; her cultural identity means she experiences life differently, and it feels like a great privilege to be let into that.

Here she is talking about Flora, the customer who has died;

Flora’s stubborn refusal to vanish began to irk me. Although it figured. She would haunt the store. Flora was a devoted reader, a passionate book collector. Our speciality is Native books, of course, her main interest. But here comes the annoying part: she was a stalker – of all things Indigenous. Maybe stalker is too harsh a word. Let’s say instead that she was a very persistent wannabe.

As you can see, it’s all in the tone; Tookie’s deadpan humour and her matter-of-fact honesty.

I’ve mentioned the novel’s plotting and characters, but I should also flag up its crafts-womanship and poetic skill. The Sentence  of the title has multiple meanings, which go on reverberating right to the end: but I won’t say any more about that. Go read!

The Sentence is published by Corsair.

Jane Rogers' Body Tourism is reviewed here.

Jane is a regular contributor to Writers Review. Here are more of her choices:

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie James

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

On dramatising No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe for radio

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.

OUR HUNDREDTH POST! Guest review by Graeme Fife: ZEKE AND NED by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history, four studies of the mountain ranges of southern Europe and, like many of us, waits with the patience of Job for decision on a number of manuscripts. He is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent.

Larry McMurtry is a captivating writer, a weaver of stories out of a tradition of campfire yarn-spinning which evokes Homer’s epic poems. McMurtry’s fictional landscape is that of the borderlands and open territories of the old West, the lands overrun in the great expansion of America by the settlers which led to the eviction of the peoples who’d lived on their ancestral lands for millenia. They spoke of borrowing land, the pioneers demanded ownership.

McMurtry has collaborated with Ossana on books and screenplays – their adaptation of Brokeback Mountain won an Oscar in 2005 – and in Zeke and Ned they explore a particularly fraught passage of late nineteenth century history in the forging of the Union which resonates powerfully in what is happening to that Union today. Even as I read the novel, it occurred to me that it goes some way to illuminate why the NRA exerts such a powerful influence in American politics, not only with its strident claim to the right to bear arms apparently enshrined in the Constitution, but to the visceral desire of its vociferous members to embody the freewheeling spirit of the frontiersmen, "a manz gotta do wotta …" blah blah.

Zeke and Ned is loosely based on the life of Ned Christie, a Cherokee, who, as a child, walked what the dislocated tribes called The Trail of Tears, the long, punitive march from their homelands in the south-eastern states to lands west of the Mississippi, under the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The novel explores the anguish and heartbreak of the clash between the displaced peoples and the relentless onslaught of ‘white law’, administered by often ill-paid and harassed judges in small town outposts and enforced in hot lead by US Marshalls, many of them post-bellum bandits, criminals, thugs and murderers, who could no more fire a pistol accurately than they could read. The terror of such application of notional justice is apparent in Ned’s summation of his plight, accused of murder, in hiding: ‘The one thing he could count on about the white law…was that sooner or later, day or night, winter or summer, they would come’.

The novel ends with chapters loosely based on the historical fact of Ned Christie’s War, when Ned fights off a succession of villainous white posses sent to root him out of the fort he’d constructed for his young wife – recently brutalised by one posse - and himself in the woods on the uplands of Shady Mountain in Oklahoma.

In these days where truth has taken on a Humpty Dumptyish aspect and facts are, it seems, manipulable, it’s interesting to ponder the matter of a novel’s truth – a resonance in our understanding of human relationships – and its bending, or ditching of facts in deference to narrative propulsion, a hallmark of McMurtry’s writing. Does that vitiate the history? I don’t believe so. As someone once remarked about the historian Tacitus: ‘He may have got his facts wrong, but he told the truth.’ For the novel admits to fiction as a means of exploring the jeopardies of the people caught up in its own construct of dramatic facts.

The imitation of serious events, the hero destroyed by excess of virtues, the explosion and, thereby, catharsis of passions, a scenario that stirs pity and fear…all make Zeke and Ned a compelling American tragedy. A similar tragedy may, surely and grimly, be seen to resurface in Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas…too many others.

A while ago, I noted the sign above a gun shop in north-west America: Blessed are the Piece Makers, this at a time when protesters at the closure of the pits were parading with placards declaring: God, Guns and Coal made America Great.

Hiding behind the insistence that guns are a right and hunting an integral part of American manhood, the clamour of the NRA has a rocky logic: bad man with gun is stopped by good man with gun. Really?

Zeke and Ned concludes, in poignant reminiscence of Ned’s marksmanship as a squirrel hunter: ‘…there would be the shot; bark would fly from the limb the squirrel was on; then Mr Squirrel would come sailing down. He made it seem as easy as whistling, Ned. Easy as whistling, was how Ned made it seem…’

McMurtry’s prolific output includes a masterly series of novels, both comic and sorrowful, and unfailingly sympathetic, centred on small town Texas, beginning with The Last Picture Show…a continuum of America’s contemporary history.

Zeke and Ned is published by Simon and Schuster