Book Review |
Canaan's Tongueby Michael J. Sherry |
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Canaan’s Tongue
by John Wray
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005 $25
The remnants of a shattered crime organization wait on a Southern plantation for the Civil War to finish them off. Their charismatic—if physically stunted and theatrical leader—Thaddeus Morelle, a “plain-faced dumpling of a man” known as the Redeemer, is dead, leaving his underlings to piece together this assemblage of individual retrospectives. So goes the plot of Canaan’s Tongue, the second book by prizewinning author John Wray (The Right Hand of Sleep). Their trade, which involves the springing of slaves to sell at a profit and eventually murder, is threatened by the rising tide of abolitionist sentiment, the same on which they once depended. Vicious criminals, yes, and yet none of Wray’s characters are at any point islands unto themselves. Instead, they are all subject to the will of a still-higher power, becoming its “play-thing” and being “fashioned and favored toward that end alone.” Even the big shots get stuck with this bone. This is life as part of “the Trade,” a continuously re-invented enterprise that we are told will eventually encompass the world and hide in the very language, feeding on us even while we think ourselves cured. The novel’s political premise is none-too-subtle: men and women, lured by the promise of freedom and prosperity, walk right into slavery and death. “The country itself will have this fever,” we are warned, and “its transparency will be its shelter.” Yet if Wray stops just short of using billboards to advertise this point, Canaan still manages to fascinate us with its gothic intrigue and imaginative strangeness. It is a rare and absorbing book that manages to transcend both historical period and cultural agenda to deliver what is ultimately a fresh perspective on a tried and tired Matrix school of thought.
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