“Above the dry hills the air turned white — that shimmering electric pallor that pretended to promise rain in the desert, and the hard wind swirling up grit from the ground, while Ned climbed trees to nail up speakers behind D—‘s speaking stone, and Crunchy and Creamy stirred up batches of gangster acid, cut with speed, with Tab or Mountain Dew in plastic garbage cans, so that it rained snakes instead of water, and I — I tore my robe to bare one breast and caught such a snake, its diamond back writhing over my hand, meaning to bind it around my brow as a living coronet, wedge head erect and spitting venom while I danced outside the borders of any mortal consciousness, whirling my thyrsus in one hand and a wildcat’s spotted cub in another.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 06, 2011)

I have chosen this rather longer quotation to show how Madison Smartt Bell can turn on a dime between a realistic description of a California druggie cult in the late sixties to an evocation of the revels of Dionysian maenads from the earliest age of Greek mythology. The link here is an acid trip, but Bell does not need chemicals to effect his alchemy. In 2001, when the book opens, the narrator Mae is a middle-aged croupier in a Las Vegas area casino. Bell’s description is realistic and immediate: “Only the whirl of lights and the electronic burbling of machines, rattle of dice in the craps table cups, and almost inaudible whisper of cards, the friction-free hum of roulette wheels turning.” But two sentences later, he has already made the shift: “It was a sort of fifth-rate hell, and I a minor demon posted to it. A succubus too indifferent to suck.” Writing of the harsh life of the trailer park behind a chain-link fence in the desert, with the tracks of ATVs crossing the serpentine marks of sidewinders in the sand — Cormac McCarthy country — Bell can match the master, image for image. But he is also liable to launch into a passage of Classical Greek (and, what’s more, leave it untranslated)! There are scenes of drugs, sex, mutilation, and murder in this book that would normally turn my stomach, but Bell’s ability to juggle the violence of the American underbelly with the Bacchic celebration of unbridled passion, and to keep both balls scintillating in the air at the same time, made for such an exhilarating experience that I was fascinated throughout. It was even worth the nightmares when I went to bed.

Perhaps it worked for me because I have had a classical education, and have worked with myth all my professional life. I think the intensity of the writing will still come through to those who do not catch the references, but it might still be worth checking the Wikipedia article on Orpheus before starting. Not just his trip to the underworld to reclaim Eurydice, but also the less familiar legends about his death, torn apart by maenads in the throes of a Dionysian orgy. Two important figures in the novel are referred to by their initials only — rather coyly, since the allusion is pretty obvious: O— (Orpheus) is a rock star, living in a beach house in Malibu; D— (Dionysus) is the charismatic leader of a drug cult known as The People. Although this may sound impossibly fantastic, so was a lot else that was going on in the late sixties, not least the murderous Manson Family. Madison Smartt Bell’s miracle is his ability to be simultaneously mythic and utterly realistic.

The novel, broken into 74 very short chapters, begins in 2001. Mae’s reaction to the World Trade Center attack is different from that of most Americans. She compiles the news footage into a two-hour tape that she watches again and again, reveling in it: “The planes bit chunks from the sides of the towers and the gorgeous sheets of orange flame roared up and the mortals flung away from the glittering windows like soap flakes swirling in a snow globe and the tower shuddered, buckled, blossomed and came showering down.” It is clear she has a fascination with violence, and in alternating chapters we discover why. Traumatized by incestuous abuse (worse in that she seems to have embraced rather than resisted it), she leaves home as a teenager and travels to California, “balling for bread” as she puts it. There, she is picked up by D— and recruited into The People, living in their commune outside San Francisco, taking part in activities which become more and more anarchic. When the police raid the compound, Mae manages to escape with her lover Laurel, but the two later separate to go into hiding under false identities. Now, over 30 years later, the memories come flooding back, triggered by a news shot of Laurel fleeing from Ground Zero: “So I saw Laurel for the first time again, Laurel kneeling on the sidewalk, her head thrown back, her hands stretched out with the fingers crooked, as weapons or in praise. Blood was running from the corners of her mouth, like in the old days, though not for the same reason.”

These closing words of the opening chapter, which itself is only a page and a half long, deliver a mule kick into a roller-coaster of a ride. It is horrible yet thrilling, sickening yet exhilarating, with a tense pace that never lets up. Other than McCarthy, it makes me think of Robert Stone, who writes an appreciation on the cover, of the violence of Roberto Bolaño, and most recently of Carlos Fuentes, whose Destiny and Desire makes a similar play between myth and reality. But The Color of Night is leaner and meaner than any of these, and more brilliant in its darkness. Undoubtedly one of my best books of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Madison Smartt Bell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Devil’s Dream

Bibliography:

• The Washington Square Ensemble (1983)
• Waiting for the End of the World (1985)
• Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime) (1986)
• The Year of Silence (1987)
• Soldier’s Joy (1989)
• Barking Man and Other Stories (1990)
• Doctor Sleep (1991)
• Save Me, Joe Louis (1993)
• Ten Indians (1996)
• Anything Goes (2002)
• Devil’s Dream (2009)
• The Color of Night (April 2011)

Haitian series:

• All Soul’s Rising (1995) 
• Master of the Crossroads (2000)
• The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004)

Nonfiction:

• Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure (1997)
• Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft and Form (2000)
• Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (2005)
• Toussaint L’Ouverture (2006)
• Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore (2007)

“He don’t tell no lies,” Ben said, scraping shavings more urgently from the cedar. “He got a mean mouth, and don’t we all know it. Hot temper and a hard hand. I know it better’n most.” Ben touched the scar that flashed out of his temple. “But I ain’t never known him to lie to nobody, and neither have you.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 26, 2010)

This is a slave talking about his master, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a real character who became one of the most respected Confederate generals in the Civil War. At one point, Bedford breaks a pot over Ben’s head in rage at his insubordination, only to realize that there is a better way to gain his cooperation. So at considerable expense of time and treasure, he seeks out Ben’s wife, who had been sold away from him, and buys her back to be his companion. A former slave-trader who nonetheless treats his people with respect, this is only one of the contradictions that make Forrest so fascinating. Of minimal education himself, he nonetheless manages to win the heart of Mary Ann Montgomery, the genteel product of a finishing school, who tempers his roughness with grace, understanding, and a firm touch. Although still obviously in love with his wife, Bedford finds a different kind of passion with a slave woman, Catharine, with whom he will have several children. Two of his sons, one legitimate and the other not, will fight with him in the war, and the rivalry between them and their mixed pride and envy of their father forms one of the lesser strands in this absorbing and exciting book.

I should say that I am no Civil War buff, and have read very few other books about the conflict. This one is simply terrific, not because it casts light on events that I already know, but because it leads me into a world I hardly knew at all. I can think of only one other novel that comes so close to making me feel the detail and texture of the war, Michael Shaara’s magnificent The Killer Angels, his novelization of Gettysburg. But while Shaara takes the panoptic view, giving equal time to generals and soldiers on both sides, Bell filters everything through the eyes of Forrest and those closest to him. While Shaara focuses on a single set-piece battle, Bell deals as much with skirmishes, raids, and surprise attacks, a kind of fighting in woods and mountains that seems closer to guerilla tactics than the maneuvers of large armies. And while Shaara covers the action of only a few days, Bell ranges freely over a period of two decades, from 1845 to 1865.

Perhaps Bell’s most significant decision was not to tell the book chronologically. His forty shortish chapters jump around between the prewar period, the war itself, and the immediate aftermath. This may make it difficult to trace the course of Forrest’s career, but the outlines soon become clear, and Bell compensates with a meticulous chronological appendix. Each chapter centers around a specific anecdote, giving the book a series of immediate paybacks on the way to a powerful cumulative effect. I’m not sure I always understood the reason for the ordering of specific chapters, but the result is to give the book a psychological rather than historical unity. The connecting thread is the surprising mind of Nathan Bedford Forrest himself, with all his built-in contradictions. Bell also introduces — indeed opens with — a kind of chorus character, a free black from Haiti by way of New Orleans, whose name, Henri, is transformed into “Ornery” by the soldiers. Henri has the gift of second sight, able to foresee people’s deaths, and in some of the more visionary scenes he is actually dead himself. Oddly enough, this fantastic aspect enhances the immediacy of the rest. It threads through the book like the “Devil’s Dream” of the title, a fiddle tune that starts slow and works up faster and faster. Time revolves, dissolves, as in Bell’s epigraph from Albert Einstein: “The separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”

The Devil, of course, is Forrest, which was how Sherman described him to Lincoln; his Dream has evaporated by the war’s end, although nothing dims the man’s fighting spirit. Bell’s other epigraph is by George Garrett: “Soldiers do not fight any better because of a good cause or a bad one.” There are plenty of episodes which can account for Forrest’s reviled reputation, not least a massacre of black and white soldiers at Fort Pillow, but Bell presents his protagonist with sympathy and understanding, and he wisely stops short of Forrest’s postwar role in founding the KKK, until he came to denounce it as a terrorist organization. What he gives us is a flawed but honest individual of irresistible personal magnetism, a rough-tongued leader who is impossible not to follow:

“Git round the left,” he shouted at the remnants of the Seventh. “Take the damnjobberknowlyankees in the rear there. Git on with ye — if ye’re feart to be shot ye best go forward for I’m well and goddam ready to shoot ye in the back if ye don’t.” Henri stared as the dapple gray reared up in the middle of the open field, under a hard rain of shrapnel and minié balls. There seemed no possibility that both horse and rider would not instantly be killed. But no. Forrest leaned forward, the horse’s front hooves regained the ground, and with a forward sweep of his blade he cried, “I’ll lead ye!”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (November 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Madison Smartt Bell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Color of Night More Civil War novels: The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright The March by E. L. Doctorow

Bibliography:

• The Washington Square Ensemble (1983)
• Waiting for the End of the World (1985)
• Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime) (1986)
• The Year of Silence (1987)
• Soldier’s Joy (1989)
• Barking Man and Other Stories (1990)
• Doctor Sleep (1991)
• Save Me, Joe Louis (1993)
• Ten Indians (1996)
• Anything Goes (2002)
• Devil’s Dream (2009)
• The Color of Night (April 2011)

Haitian series:

• All Soul’s Rising (1995) 
• Master of the Crossroads (2000)
• The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004)

Nonfiction:

• Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure (1997)
• Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft and Form (2000)
• Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (2005)
• Toussaint L’Ouverture (2006)
• Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore (2007)