Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
THE ALLEGIANCES OF STRANGERS a review by Rhonda Armstrong Taylor Brown. Fallen Land. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. Philip Gerard. The Dark of the Island. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2016.
RHONDA ARMSTRONG is Associate Professor of English at Augusta University in Georgia, where she teaches American literature and literature of the American South. Her recent publications include articles on Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, and Bobbie Ann Mason. TAYLOR BROWN is the author of a collection of short stories, In the Season of Blood and Gold (Press 53, 2014). His fiction has previously appeared in storySouth, Chautauqua, The Rumpus, and NCLR Online 2015, among other journals. His short story “Rhino Girl” won 2nd place in this year’s Betts Prize competition, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network and managed by NCLR, and was published in The Rumpus. Brown grew up on the Georgia coast, and lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and western North Carolina before settling in Wilmington. His second novel, River of Kings, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in 2017. PHILIP GERARD teaches in the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington. He is the author of eight books, including the historical novel Cape Fear Rising (John F. Blair, 1994), an excerpt from which appeared in NCLR 1994. For a sample of Gerard’s short fiction, see NCLR 2005. His collections of essays, The Patron Saint of Dreams, and Other Essays (Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2012) and Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), were reviewed in NCLR Online 2014. A musician as well as a writer, in 2015, he released his first CD, American Anthem, which includes the single “Under Hatteras Light.”
Two new historical novels, both by Wilmington writers, take the old plot line of “a stranger comes to town” in wildly different directions, using the outsider’s perspective to muse on Southern land and community and how one belongs to either. Taylor Brown’s debut novel, Fallen Land, sets a young Irish immigrant in the midst of the Civil War, sending him on a desperate journey through a diverse Southern landscape. In his latest novel, The Dark of the Island, Philip Gerard returns to the Hatteras Island community he created in his 1986 novel Hatteras Light, hopscotching back and forth from World War II to 1991 in an intricately plotted literary thriller. Through their different genres, both novels ponder themes of loyalty and belonging, questioning to whom one owes allegiance and when one is obligated to break those bonds. Taylor Brown’s Fallen Land has already garnered comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Charles Frazier. Those comparisons are apt, and they are to Brown’s credit, but his novel is also a fresh take on the themes and characterizations for which McCarthy and Frazier are known. Fallen Land is the story of Callum and Ada, two teenagers who make their way through the ravaged landscape of the Civil War South, seeking safety on the Georgia coast. Callum is a fifteen-year-old immigrant from the Tipperary workhouses, who ends up on a blockade runner and subsequently washed up on a Southern beach. He joins up with the Confederate army not because of ideology or loyalty to the South, but because his rescuer was joining the Confederate army. Like Callum, the other men of his unit are motivated by 1864, if not
N C L R ONLINE
77
earlier in the war, by their fidelity to their colonel and their own hunger: “They had long ago forsaken the war of newspapers for the one they carried everywhere with them, and which had no colors, no sides, and which could be fit neatly to any new opportunity that presented itself: ambush, pillage, torture” (42). Brown’s Civil War novel, then, takes little interest in the national politics of war, the ideology subsumed to personal allegiance and moral duty. The question of the war for young Callum is how to survive and, if possible, how to do right by the people he encounters. When the colonel betrays Callum’s allegiance, Callum abandons his unit and flees with seventeen-year-old Ava. His single-minded focus is to protect the girl and get both of them safely to the Georgia coast, where his relatives, he hopes, will take them in. Their journey takes them through the Blue Ridge Mountains and on to the burning remains of Atlanta, where they fall in behind Sherman’s army, following the Union soldiers on their own march to the sea. As they travel from high in the Appalachian Mountains down through the wasted fields and plantation houses of Georgia, Brown conjures up characters who could hold their own in any mythic tale. Callum, for all his youthful naiveté, is also an accomplished horse thief and an expert at pistol tricks. Ava, forming a neat complement for Callum, is a remarkably clear-headed young woman, philosophical and well-educated in scientific theories, and of course physically beautiful, tall with long, dark hair and striking blue eyes. Their love story builds slowly. When Callum first sees Ava, he is struck by her beauty and her calm, and