Something very unusual has happened. Taylor Brown, a native of St. Simons and alumnus of the University of Georgia (‘05), may well be a new voice in our literature.
Readers were introduced to him by a volume of short stories, In the Season of Blood and Gold. I could read only one story a day; each was so disturbing, so haunting. And the writing was tight, powerful, often poetic, always piercing.
One has the same experience in the novel, but here the entire atmosphere is elemental, and the naturalistic surface finally dissolves into the mythic. This is a Civil War novel, but one reflecting man’s situation in the universe. Beginning in the mountains of Virginia, it ends by following Sherman’s March to the Sea. But here the burning of Atlanta becomes an evocative symbol of something strong, chaotic and unknowable at the heart of existence.
The story line, which surfaces from the brutally poetic prose, has to do with the boy Callum, an Irish orphan taken into a band of Confederate guerillas, who finds a young woman, Ava, hiding in a house under siege.
In an opening section as confusing and unsettling as that of “Wolf Hall,” after a hallucinating recovery from a wound, the boy is witness to the shooting and death of the colonel of the band. He then escapes his own lynching and rides the colonel’s horse, Reiver, back for Ava.
The book traces their progress down to Atlanta, fleeing bounty hunters who think Callum the colonel’s killer. Both pursuers and pursued then follow Sherman’s path to the sea. This is no Gone with the Wind, but a parable of man’s fight for existence and meaning in a stark and ravaged world. I see many influences—Proust’s scrutiny of the levels of consciousness; an aesthetic, Catherian sense of landscape; a Faulknerian feel for language. But Fallen Land stands by itself, even beyond the author’s acknowledged debt to Irish and Appalachian ballards. It is powerful and haunting on its own terms.
Taylor Brown will give a reading and sign copies of his novel, Fallen Land, at Avid Bookshop Friday, Jan. 15 at 6:30 p.m.
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