Play Book Tag discussion

This entire book is set in post Civil War Tennessee. I don't know why it has been tagged Western. Tennessee is the South!



A Thousand Moons - Barry
4 stars

”You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.”

This is Barry’s follow-up to Days Without End. I do not think it is possible to understand this book without reading the first one. The story is set in post Civil War Tennessee. Thomas McNulty and John Cole have settled on Lige Magan’s farm with their adopted daughter, Winona. The story is told in Winona’s voice. It’s uneven storytelling. Winona is clearly an unreliable narrator and she knows it. She cannot remember the brutal event that set a match to a powder keg of violent consequences. The storytelling is further obscured by Winona’s restricted vocabulary. Barry has projected a 19th century Southern dialect (that may or may not be accurate). Additionally, Winona’s narrative is further obscured by her reluctance, or complete inability, to name the crime. (view spoiler)[She was raped. (hide spoiler)]

I have 25 meaningful passages of this book highlighted. I’d originally given this book a 3 star rating, but I bumped it up when I reread those highlights. There were things about this book that disappointed me, but Barry’s words still manage to sound a powerful chord in me. For example:

“An injury to one soul might be of small account in the great and endless flower-chain of human injuries. But was not the law designed to peer at each, one by one, and give everything equal weight betimes?”

The disappointment here is that I never forgot that the words came from the author. When I read The Secret Scripture, Roseanne McNulty walked off the page as a real person. In Days Without End, Thomas’ Irish blarney and complete sincerity made him live on the page. Winona is a complex, wounded, and vibrant young woman. But, I wasn’t ever able to forget that she was an author’s creation. I felt a 21st agenda in the 19th century setting. This isn’t a bad thing. It just didn’t feel as natural and seamless as in the other books.

(view spoiler)[ Winona is raped while she is drunk. Certainly, this is an ageless scenario, but I somehow felt that Barry had plucked the issue from current headlines. Very realistically, Winona cannot remember the attack. It felt realistic, and simultaneously like an overly cumbersome plot device. However, Barry gives her profound words to express the emotional damage, “As so much time had gone by I was beginning to be horrified by a sense that what had happened to me was a nothing, a nothing served upon a nothing. A small little thing of no account that all girls had to bear in the general affairs of the world. That it would mean nothing to them and that the word nothing would be much in their mouths as they applied it to me. Under this thought I perished time and time again. I shivered in my sense of dreadful smallness.” It’s a heartbreaking statement, but it’s somehow devoid of the heavy dialect that is usually present in Winona’s voice. (hide spoiler)]

There’s so much desperation in this book; the desperate poverty and grinding hard work of a small farm; the lawless, violent, resurgence of white supremacy. The plot builds with a heavy sense of dread that there is no possibility of justice for Winona, a full blooded native American, or for the Bouguereau siblings, freed slaves who work on the farm. I hoped for a happy ending for these characters. I didn’t expect it. The author was clearly present in the deus ex machina of the abrupt ending.