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<\/a>James Lee Burke is not just from Southern Louisiana, he is of Southern Louisiana. New Iberia, to be exact, where he has set his magnificent novel about the War Between the States (note to northern readers \u2014 Southerners, even a certain editor, do not refer to the Civil War). It\u2019s 1863, and the Union \u201cblue bellies\u201d have pushed the now-ragged Confederate forces across Louisiana toward Texas. Yet all the forces are in close proximity. An Army of irregulars, known as the \u201cRed Legs,\u201d bivouac just a couple of plantations down from the Union forces headed by General Banks, known \u201d\u2026for his incompetence and the record number of cotton bales he has kept safe and sound for businessmen everywhere.\u201d\u00a0 All forces plunder the local plantations and farms, including taking two cows from the widow Ellen Lee Burke. The setting is a maelstrom of violence.<\/p>\nInto this chaos, the author weaves plot lines of a diverse cast of characters, each lending their distinctive voice to the narrative. Slave Hannah Laveau escapes\u00a0to avoid a murder charge, and to find her infant son, lost at Shiloh. She is aided by Miss Florence Milton, Boston schoolteacher and abolitionist. They are, according to Constable Pierre Cauchon, \u201c\u2026members of a special group who refuse to flinch, the kind who don\u2019t consider bravery a virtue\u2026 The irony is they don\u2019t know how brave they are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cauchon is reluctantly on their heels, a disabled soldier consigned to keep order in the Negro community with little salary, no budget,and harassment from all sides. He in turn tries mightily to avoid the\u00a0attentions of Darla Babineaux, a freed slave who stayed on the plantation, where the two have sat \u201c\u2026cracking pecans while the western skies were aflame with a dying culture that no one can explain.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s another losing battle for him.<\/p>\n
Two of Burke\u2019s battle pilgrims speak in eloquent voices of the connection between the past and our present turmoil, observations that resonate. The Red Leg commander Colomel Carleton Hayes, his face afflicted with \u201c\u2026the work of the devil and the wenches in his hire,\u201d observes \u201ca battlefield is a mortician\u2019s delight, a tool used to reduce the herd, and every poppy on it is nursed by a corpse.\u201d\u00a0 Dr. Wade Lufkin, his own face destroyed by a disastrous duel, speaks of the inevitability of war: \u201cWith time, atrocities will happen and one side will provoke the other and each will take revenge in turn, and we will go home with secrets we share with no one. That\u2019s the reality of war, not the quixotic babbling of poets.\u201d The author never leaves the past in the past.<\/p>\n
With a balance of voices and action, Burke guides his crew across battlefields, into the swamp, through the hands of slave catchers and other adversity to salvation. They end up in an unearthly setting, one that will render the reader unable to look at the work of a certain French artist the same way ever again.<\/p>\n
All of this occurs in Burke\u2019s brilliant prose. Phenomenal phrases pop up on every other page. Burke does not describe events, he embeds them in the setting. He shows us Darla Babineaux, \u201c\u2026the sunlight through the oak trees is shifting on her skin and hair and clothes like a net of gold coins.\u201d\u00a0 During battle, \u201cThe Yankees explode another shell overhead, the echo rolling across the land, the sunlight and every leaf trembling in the pecan tree next to the farmhouse.\u201d Once again, James Lee Burke demonstrates why he is one of America\u2019s best novelists.<\/p>\n
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Bob Moyer reviews the latest novel by one of his favorite authors. One note: Despite what Bob writes, not all Southerners called the conflict of the 1860s the War Between the States. Some – I think particularly of an elderly woman who owned a historic house in downtown Charleston that a group of graduate students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,426,4,1],"tags":[363,1372,101,191],"class_list":["post-3166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-fiction","category-popular-fiction","category-southern-fiction","category-uncategorized","tag-civil-war","tag-flags-on-the-bayou","tag-historical-fiction-2","tag-james-lee-burke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3169,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3166\/revisions\/3169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}