Nathan Harrison
Tinder Press
Otago Daily Times, October 30th 2021
Set in a Southern town just after the end of the Civil War, the tensions between Confederate and Unionist, local and outsider, slaver and enslaved form the novel’s heavy backdrop.
It is the story of a white family suffocating under the weight of words unspoken and two brothers, former slaves, seeking freedom in this new world. This relationship, whose tentative movement from transactional to personal is overshadowed by an act of violence that binds them together as it splits them apart, generating a metaphorical – and literal – fire that both erases the existing structure of their lives and creates space for regrowth and renewal.
Harris successfully evokes the rhythms and cadences of 19th-century America (a formality that feels oddly stiff until one becomes acclimatised) and captures the brutality of slavery and hierarchical dynamics of small-town life disconcertingly well. His characters reflect the diversity of responses that must surely accompany the Reconstruction, and their stories show the enduring effects of casual cruelty and small kindnesses on individuals and communities.
That said, the Black characters are not developed as fully as I would have liked, and the novel ends with a vision of racial reconciliation that left me unconvinced. Indeed, were it not written by a person of colour, the story as a whole would smack of virtue signalling, if not full-on white saviour complex.
My ambivalence has not been shared by many other reviewers, however, who and have described it as lyrical, moving, and a contemporary classic.
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