Thirteen Moons

Charles Frazier

Hachette Livre

Otago Daily Times, March 17th 2007

The 19th century was a tumultuous time for the United States — a country where government survey maps plunge into whiteness at the borders of Indian Territory, a country where Davy Crockett and the wild frontier were the stuff of life rather than legend.

In his latest novel, Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier encapsulates a definitive era in American history (and the brutal disenfranchisement of the Indian people) within an intimate and idiosyncratic portrait of a single life.

Will Cooper may have been born white, but by mutual consent has been Indian for most of his long life. Only 12 years old when indentured to a trading post at the edge of Indian Nation, he is formally adopted by the local Cherokee chief, Bear, a farsighted and pragmatic man determined to protect the life and traditions of his people by whatever means necessary.

Faced with the forced removal of the Cherokee from their lands (the infamous ‘Trail of Tears’), Bear and Will embark upon an ambitious plan to protect their clan by turning the Government’s weapons to their own advantage, buying huge tracts of tribal land with the profits from Will’s trading posts and stalling relocation in a maze of political lobbying and litigation.

Frazier does not shy away from moral ambiguity however, and this is not a simple story of the noble savage versus the corrupt settler. For every leader like Bear there is a chief such as Featherstone (and his wife, Claire, the object of Will’s passionate obsession) who wholeheartedly adopt the colonial way of life, becoming plantation holders and slave owners at the expense of their own people. Will is forced to hunt down fugitive Indian families to protect the interests of the larger clan, and his memoirs are as full of regret as satisfaction.

Charles Frazier’s writing is sharp, clever and incisive, in particular his ability to summarise cultural complexities in a few well-chosen words; “My opinion was if hogs were biting you so often that you had to make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem” and “Some tools and farm implements so simple that their names rarely contained more than three or four letters. Plow, axe, hoe, adze, froe, maul”.

This, in combination with his evocative portrait of the land along the Mississippi made this book a delight to read.

I was less convinced by the “love story” hailed in the promotional blurb — a passionate, if sporadic, affair between Will and Claire is a secondary plot line but the narrative felt emotionally detached — but I still left with an impression of time and place (not to mention resonances with New Zealand’s own colonial past) that felt personally familiar.

I finished Thirteen Moons with a greater insight than that with which I came to it, a threshold many novels fail to cross.