Fallen Land by Taylor Brown
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book takes place at the very end of the civil war*, where disorganized and factionless gangs of opportunistic men took advantage of the confusion and lawlessness of war’s aftermath to settle scores and take for themselves whatever hadn’t already been destroyed.
which is the kind of story i really dig – i love cormac mccarthy, i loved The Winter Family, i love stories about individuals pared down to the barest essentials, as free from morality or politeness as animals, surviving in a world unimpressed by man’s “progress.”
so i was a little apprehensive at the start of this novel, when the fifteen-year-old protagonist callum prevents the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl by one of his fellow marauders, killing him and losing the hearing in one of his ears for his troubles. there’s a scene shortly thereafter when callum confronts the remaining men about the situation, and about what subsequently happened to the girl while callum was unconscious that reads like shame:
None of the men looked at him. They looked at the fire or their hands or their boots but not at him.
which shame has no place in the amoral landscape of the books i love, so i was concerned that this was going to be some pandering version of a western, where punches were pulled for the benefit of sentimental readers. i’m not someone who revels in descriptions of rape and murder, but i also don’t want to be gentled into some sugarcoated mythology of wartime heroism where only bad guys got killed and no one was raped and all the animals lived forever.
thankfully, this turned out to not be the case, and while this book was never quite the nihilistic splatterland of The Winter Family, it was definitely intense. it was like a combination of The Fugitive and joe lansdale’s The Thicket, as callum and ava are pursued by relentless trackers across a landscape still suffering the death throes of a war no one’s noticed is over. the tension comes from men intent upon revenge or a payday for callum’s capture, but also from the very basic concerns of your typical wilderness-survival story: cold, food, illness, injury, having supplies, losing supplies, knowing when to hide and knowing whom to trust.
the writing is nothing like mccarthy’s economy of prose – the descriptions are lush and poetic, even when describing the desolation of the wilderness callum and ava are traveling through:
First light rose colorless over hills crumpled and creased into one another, a sheet enameled over a miscellany of untold items, of corpses and rock and whatever else gave the earth its shape.
and it’s full of alliteration and consonance and assonance and all that literary stuff cowboy-types love.
Moonlight licked down through the dark fingerlings of the trees that tunneled their path, slinking like quicksilver along the ground.
the writing is beautiful, and brown is skilled at maintaining the energy of his story and knowing when to scissor down to end a chapter on a ka-POW note.
as far as characters go, i loved swinney the most, and i thought his brand of good intentions/shrugging helplessness was crucial as a contrast to the rest of the pretty clearly divided good/evil of the rest of the characters.
a pretty fantastic debut, and i’ll be wanting to read more from him.
* or the war of northern aggression, if you prefer.
