The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee
My rating: 4/5 cats
My God, how we are destroyed
man, this is one meaty book.
and it took me forever to read. not because it was boring; it’s not that at all. it’s just that it moves at a slow, deliberate pace and there are a lot of storylines to absorb, where each character is given their own manifest destiny-style room to expand and develop. the characters are particularly well-written here; at first there are good guys and bad guys (where “guys” is a gender-neutral term) and questionable decisions made by all, but by the end of the book, the reader has learned enough about these characters that distinctions like “good” and “bad” collapse into “human,” which is ultimately what you want in literary fiction.
but it’s not literary fiction that’s being a dick about it – it’s not intellectually taxing for readers who enjoy books that take their time to unfold and have a number of strong characters driving the narrative. if you have a book club with members willing to dive into a book this size and speed, it’s perfect for discussion, and it’s a good mix of genres: historical fiction, family saga, mystery, western and an equally good mix of themes – race and gender and family and historical atrocities and the struggle to exist in a world where nature and man are equally cruel.
The roads to the Black Hills gold were strewn with with skeletons of horses and mules and oxen driven to death in the mad hurry to reach men’s destiny. Furniture discarded, empty barrels, crates of clothing and mementos, even toys left behind once the babe itself was gone. It was a hard land for those without patience. Time ruled this land, and in time everyone was wounded, and everything of value disappeared.
it’s got all the best parts of the western: slow-burning vengeance, stubborn perseverance, lawlessness, savage violence, moral flexibility, the pursuit of gold and oil, hardship, and an absence of community – these are men and women hardened by their own struggle to carve out a fragile existence in an unpredictable environment; deceptively beautiful natural landscapes that can turn in an instant, bringing cyclones, drought, and blizzards that can destroy everything in their wake, where a family can just starve to death and no one will help. or rather – the only man willing to help gets murdered on page 11, on his own land, beside the still-warm body of a murdered lakota girl.
cue the mystery elements. there’s the big mystery: the double murder that opens the book as well as the maybe-attempted-murder of the character who discovers the bodies, but the murders actually take a back seat – they spur the action and flavor the rest of the book, but several smaller scale mini-mysteries get in the way – family secrets, arrangements, and estrangements, shady land dealings, contested wills, suspicious characters, and the looming shadow of the memory of the massacre at wounded knee, which links several characters in shame or outrage.
the book scoots back and forth through time, and includes the massacre (which is absolutely horrifying. well-written, but gutting), as well as events leading up to and following the event. and all of the questions will be answered, although some of them will be answered without fanfare, quietly inserted in casual, “blink and you’d miss ’em” ways. which i love.
i’ve barely scratched the surface in this meandering review – that’s how much there is to this one. but i will say it’s a stunning book, and it lingers. it is very much worth the time it will take you to digest it.
He had to keep going, if for no other reason than the hope that the work would kill him and it would all be over.
i promise it will not kill you.
