Three parts, one big read

Shadow Country

Taken as an analysis of jurisprudence in early Floridian social life, or as a naturalist’s handbook to the flora and fauna of mangrove swamps, or taken as a social documentary of pre-WWI life, or as an exhaustive study on racism, the book stands tall. But it is all of these things and more. These main themes are interwoven to such an extent that the book never flags. Quite an achievement.

Part one of the book concerns the arrival of EJ Watson to a trading outpost on his skiff in the swamplands of southern Florida. As the boat pulls up Watson is confronted by an armed group of 20 men who want to arrest him for his part in the slaughter upstream of several individuals. Watson denies involvement, but as he raises his gun he is cut to pieces in a hail of gunfire.

As more light is shed on Watson’s background, the reader learns that, true to his word, he was not involved in the killing of two farm hands and a foreman. But the mob isn’t good on hard facts as many writers such as Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn) make clear. Mathiessen’s mob is a semi-literate, vengeful, vindictive monster, though equipped with a modicum of intelligence.

In part two, one of Watson’s many children, Lucius, tries to get to the bottom of the story, rapidly becoming a myth, of the events that led to his father’s killing.

Armed with a list of the men involved he ends up meeting most of them and is shocked that he likes several. He gradually understands that his father had no connection to several of the deaths for which he was blamed. However his reputation was ruined by innuendo and rumour which he did little to abate, being a hard-drinking womaniser and a crack shot to boot.

Part three, by far the longest, rewinds to the early life of Watson before bringing events up to date. It is narrated by Watson himself, which raises an interesting question, namely, how does the narrator relate his own death. Watson paints a picture of his early brutalised life at the hands of his father. Mathiessen superbly shows here how family disputes can reverberate down the generations and themselves get embroiled in myth and rumour.

Then, just as the reader is beginning to warm to Watson, we find out that in fact he was a killer, executing two farm hands who were getting “uppity”. Full of remorse for those killings he gets dragged into others by his former friend, the ghoulish Leslie Cox. Surely one of the most darkly gothic characters to emerge from fiction. The treatment of blacks at the hands of the whites is movingly portrayed, evidenced by Watson’s employee Frank Short.

Mathiessen had originally written 1,500 pages but was instructed by his publisher to whittle it down to about 900 pages. Damned publishers.