Nature vs. Capitalism
Constance Ash May 1st, 2007
I finally finished Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons, his first novel since the wild success of Cold Mountain. I may have some trouble with this novel on certain grounds, such as the ‘good, magic, authentic Indian’ vs. the ‘bad mixed blood Indian’ and the tale having both Indians’ lives to a large degree revolve around the tale’s narrator, another magical person, who is a white man.
Shades of ye olde James Fenimore Cooper’s white Natty Bumpo hero, Chingachgook, the perfect authentic magic Indian, and Magua, the evil half-breed in The Last of the Mohicans (which BBC 1972 series I recently viewed too — but be assured, I have read all of the Leatherstocking Tales several times, starting as a child). Nevertheless, this Frazier fellow writes so very well, and tells a satisfactory tale. The book was an excellent bridge, a chapter or two a night, from the day’s activities to sleep.
Whether one would feel the same way if one were say, actually a Cherokee or a Creek, or a member of a family that survived the forced removal from the Southern Atlantic coastal lands to dusty Oklahoma via the infamous Trail of Tears, could well not be the case, perhaps. Additionally, Frazier’s characters who are removed, are among the very wealthy Cherokees, who owned plantations and slaves, and they didn’t march. They took train and ship and horseback with all their chattels, including their human ones, and then went to work rebuilding their mansions on the flatlands, with their slaves busting sod.
Certainly the author meant well. We always do though, don’t we?
However, as I’ve spent some time in the landscapes in which the novel is located since Cold Mountain came out (I had some serious troubles with the slavery situation in that book, which was so benignly portrayed, by and large, and yet evidently still not benignly enough for Hollywood, since the principal black character got turned white in the movie). I’ve spent a few days over a period of 3 years now in Asheville, North Carolina where Frazier was born (and which is also the natality of Thomas Wolfe). So the landscapes in which he locates the actions had another dimension of enjoyment that wouldn’t have been part of what I could bring to the text if I hadn’t hadn’t been there. This landscape still retains the power to hurt you and for you to get lost.
There have been many changes in this mountainous, wooded environment since the time span covered in the novel, but the novel is about time and change. There is a great deal of musing upon the big changes in this land in the living memory of many of the novel’s characters in contrast to how it is at the opening of the novel, and how during the long time frame of the story, more changes yet take place. This is what can be called, in literary terms, an elegiac novel. It teeters just on the edge of nostalgia and sentimentality, but the narrator’s voice works very hard to maintain a certain sardonic hard-nosed realism in play.
If you like reading good Western fiction, Thirteen Moons provides the satisfaction of a Western, which this Southern tale, the characters and the location are prototype for, which we see immediately post Civil War showing up in our national entertainment, along with the Wild West shows — all of which are part of Frazier’s novel.
I’ve nearly finished Sixty Days and Counting, the third installment in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate change trilogy. Continue Reading »