A Shout in the Ruins

Kevin Powers

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, July 14th 2018

After tackling the Iraqi conflict in Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers’ return to print traverses the equally problematic territory of the American Civil War.

At the centre of the story are two households; that of muleteer Bob Reid and his entrepreneurial neighbour Antony Levallois. Joining them are their slaves, Rawls and Nurse, Reid’s daughter Emily, and a ‘dim-witted’ boy called John Talbot whom he informally adopts later in life. The novel traces their changing fortunes through the conflict, occasionally branching forward in time to follow other, connected stories only to return again to its origin in 1860’s Virginia.

Although Powers’ novel clearly exposes the casual brutality of the war and the lack of effect that it had on the fortunes of those is supposedly liberated, its primary motive is philosophical rather than historical. The text is littered with repeated images of mechanisms and machines, chains of cause and effect juxtaposed against random acts that render all predictions of the future useless, and Powers’ characters are archetypes through which to explore and express various form of existential angst.

Reid, whose prosperity is built on the old order, thinks himself a good man because he would be prepared to keep his slaves even if required to pay them. The opportunistic Levallois, a man of the new world, is colour-blind insofar as he treats everybody as a means to an end. Yet despite priding himself for recognising that “the world was changing but … people were not changing with it”, his belief in manifest destiny is as delusional as Reid’s.

Rawls and Nurse meanwhile see the world clearly but are powerless to change it.  Understanding that “today will be a hard day, and tomorrow even harder”, it is their job to call out their masters’ hypocrisy. Nurse recognises that for all Levallois’ “cultivated distance and machinations he [is]… an insignificant tooth in a gear that would continue turning whether one broke off or not”, whilst Rawls despises Reid’s beneficence, hating the notion that “ if white folks just believed they would be good in a different world, a world that did not exist, then that made them good in the one that did.”

True goodness is exemplified not by Rawls but by John, who “accepted the world as it was quite easily, as his mind created no alternatives for improvement or diminishment…when a man has a choice and yet abstains from the ruination of what little piece of the earth he can alter, he is called a good man. If it comes as naturally to him as breathing, we call him a simpleton.” And, being a true innocent, he must ultimately be sacrificed in service of the story.

A Shout in the Ruins is not entirely bleak – the spark sustaining its characters is the belief that love can come from less than nothing – but Power’s heavy style and subject matter will discourage a causal audience.  It certainly will leave those who do read with much to think about.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/angst-through-civil-war-prism