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2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
Person, Place, Thing, or Idea: Reading the Past in Three North Carolina Set Historical Novels a review by Matthew Luter Steve Berry. The Jefferson Key. New York: Ballantine Books, 2011. Michael Parker. The Watery Part of the World. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2011. Laura S. Wharton. The Pirate’s Bastard. Kernersville, NC: Second Wind, 2010.
Matthew Luter is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. He received his MA and PhD from UNC-CH and specializes in contemporary American and Southern literature. STEVE BERRY has published six novels in the Cotton Malone series and three other novels, as well as several short stories. He spent the summers of his youth with his mother’s family in eastern North Carolina and returned to the state while researching The Jefferson Key. In 2011, Berry was a guest on UNC-TV’s series North Carolina Bookwatch.
I do not try to explain here what confluence of forces has resulted in the past year giving us three novels, each set at least in part in North Carolina, whose plot lines somehow incorporate the actions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pirates. In reading these three books, though – one a contemporary political thriller, one a literary meditation on the inhabitants of a small plot of land, and one an historical romance – I was struck not only by the differences in these novelists’ prose, but also by the writers’ radically different uses of the raw material of the past. Steve Berry is the author of several bestselling thrillers already. As The Jefferson Key opens, American intelligence officer Cotton Malone has just been framed for an assassination attempt on the President. His associates’ investigation reveals that the real culprits are the Commonwealth, a shadowy (and as far as we and Berry know, fictional) alliance of a few families with proven conspiratorial connections to all four successful presidential assassinations. The culprits bear an odd kind of apparent invulnerability, though, due to their ancestors’ ownership of a letter of marque, issued by the federal government in accordance with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, that gave them – and their descendants – immunity from almost all
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criminal charges while acting as privateers during the Revolutionary War era. Malone’s pursuit of them takes him up and down the eastern seaboard as all involved hunt down the only historical proof of the letter, two pages torn out of the Congressional record by an enraged Andrew Jackson. With all that backstory in mind, it’s a good thing Berry has a skill for incorporating exposition without shoehorning huge chunks of explanation into places where they don’t belong. Action scenes, though, don’t work as well here. The frequent narrative back-and-forth between multiple perspectives in the book’s handful of gunfights, for instance, confuses and frustrates more than it excites. Berry’s chapters are short, and nearly every one ends with some small revelation, calculated to make the reader gasp, pause, or scratch the head in confusion, only to find further explanation delayed as the following chapter travels to another location and set of characters entirely. This quasicinematic reliance on frequent crosscutting keeps the plot moving, to be sure, but it also keeps any character from getting constructed past the point that he or she must serve as a plot device. Bad guys and gals here are bad, good ones are good, and the only recognizable feature attached to those whose allegiances are unclear is indeterminacy itself.
STEPHANIE WHITLOCK DICKEN has designed for NCLR since 2001 and served as NCLR’s Art Director from 2002 to 2008. She designed the poetry and reviews in this premiere issue of NCLR Online. She is an instructor of graphic design at Pitt Community College in Greenville, NC, and can be reached at StephanieWDicken@gmail.com for freelance design work.