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Literary Review
Southern folk
THIS kind of American historical fiction goes back to James Fenimore Cooper's second novel, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), in which George Washington makes an appearance, fictional and historical characters jostle, and there is much vexation about wrangling Patriots and Loyalists. The genre has not flourished. It is hard to think of an effective novel about the American Revolution, while by comparison the fiction of the American Civil War has been various and harrowing. Gettysburg, Lincoln and Shiloh offer dark complexities which novelists can use and American readers are disposed to accept. But the Revolution is too often a child's lesson, full of uncontested truths, and, beyond the tableau of static and velvet-hosed heroes signing the Declaration of Independence, readers seldom know about its meandering events.
In recent years, Jimmy Carter has wandered the earth in search of miscreants to be observed and reformed, as once he stared into television cameras in the Oval Office and explained to the American people how virtue might banish malaise. In The Hornet's Nest, many male characters explain things. "Mr. Knox, what's the difference between Whigs and Tories?" Mr. Knox knows and soon so do we. And we come to know much about the North Carolina Regulators, the customs of the Creek Indians, the flora of Georgia, and especially the military struggle in the South. Carter is little interested in plot, though he does introduce some frontier families who migrate to Georgia to escape British tyranny, and a few of them may squeeze into the reader's memory. But Carter soon settles into a narrative of the war, during which real people (Elijah Clarke, Thomas Brown, Lord Cornwallis) are given expository dialogue.
The prose is workmanlike, but lifeless. Occasionally, to show that this is fiction, the men swear and the slaves mangle their grammar. Of more interest may be what this novel says of Carter's view of the American Revolution. He is bleak. The British authorities are shown as arbitrary and cruel, but so are the American Revolutionaries, who massacre, tar-and-feather and seem to stand for little beyond seizing land. Carter insists that the British were the better friends to Indians and slaves. Almost any historian would agree, but this is a surprising sentiment from an American President. Partly this may arise from Carter's decision to focus on the lower South where the partisan war was pointlessly violent. Thereby he leaves Washington, Jefferson and Adams offstage, and with them, the ideological clarity of 1776. But the message seems to run deeper than politics. Much futility marks the lives imagined by Carter. Marriages seem especially doomed. A wife dies of smallpox, a husband is hanged, a child is scalped and every other couple is sexually dysfunctional. At the end, Carter's main character commits adultery with a neighbour's widow, is abandoned by his wife and resolves to travel "northward to find the woman who would share it with him". Which woman, however, Jimmy Carter declines to say. In a Modernist novel, this would be a routine gesture denoting life's indeterminacy. In The Hornet's Nest, it seems to signal that, whatever happens in the public realm, a private life will probably turn out badly.
MICHAEL O'BRIEN
The Hornet's Nest, Jimmy Carter, Simon and Schuster, p.465, £17.99. 0 7432 6333 2
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