Mary Lee Settle (1918–2005)

There is something to be said for honoring one's past. The oral histories of yesteryear are the cornerstones to who we are as people today. When Mary Lee Settle decided to write about her grandmother, Addie Settle, she chose to recognize not only a blood relative, but historical events: World War I, the Great Depression and mining strikes with Mother Jones leading the way. Settle honors her own personal tapestry of life by remembering family holidays from her childhood, coming of age, and the natural beauty of Kentucky and the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia. My favorite section was the poignant moment when Settle went back to Pineville, Kentucky. Sixty-five years after leaving the area as a six year old little girl, sharp memories rushed to meet her at every turn.
As an aside: when Mary Lee Settle was nine or ten years old she wrote a poem. When that poem was published someone had changed a word in the finished copy. In childish indignation she vowed never to write again. I just love that self righteous ardor for the integrity of her craft at ten years old!… (más)

I'm normally very skeptical of historical fiction, because half of the genre is dominated by pretentious stuffed shirts who know their history well and have a snooze-inducing narrative voice, while the other half is populated by people who know next to nothing about history at all and appear determined to display that ignorance proudly with little time spent constructing a story. I also tend to be suspicious of any series of novels longer than three books because that is usually a pretty good sign the author's just writing whatever crap will sell without regard to crafting a quality story. Even worse, I tend to be profoundly reticent to invest any time in a story that crosses generations. There are exceptions to each of these cases where the trend is that I find only poorly written pablum, but to combine all three served to make me put off reading this book for a full year.

On Christmas, several of us gathered around the tree gave each other used booksas gifts, in addition to the usual gift-giving. The idea was to help each other broaden our reading horizons so we wouldn't fall into reading ruts to try new things. Prisons was one of the books I got. After struggling halfway through DH Lawrence's purple novel of spite and dull melodrama, Women In Love, before giving up on it, I was not motivated to touch Prisons. Finally, after the next year's Christmas gathering was put on hold for weather, I decided to try reading Prisons before our delayed gathering. I'm glad I did.

Early on I became even more skeptical of my likely enjoyment of the book, because the first half of it heavily uses a literary technique that is usually terribly abused and does nothing for a story: flashbacks. In fact, at first, the entire story was taking place in flashbacks. I was, however, slightly encouraged by the authenticity of the "present" events that framed the flashbacks -- the plodding life of a soldier on the road, strikingly familiar to me as an ex-soldier myself. A bit more encouragement came in the form of the evocative tone of the flashback text, the depth of characters, and eventually the way all the various threads started to come together to be woven into a well-crafted first-person narrative. The fact it unapologetically makes use of a first-person perspective inside the character's head rather than tritely justifying by way of letters or journal entries the way lesser period novels often do (such as The Illusionist) helped keep it from foundering as well.

By the time I was halfway through the book, I had realized I was reading something quite remarkable in its craftsmanship. I don't want to go into details of the story, but it is moving, comprehensive in its attention to the salient details of the story and its protagonist's life, and deeply philosophical without preaching or falling into self-conscious pretensions. Even the villains of the piece are thoroughly humanized in shocking clarity, in some cases long before there is any hint of their antagonistic place in the plot.

One might be tempted to assign a moral to the story, identifying it as a parable illustrating any of half a dozen or so oft-repeated clichés that we've all heard -- "power corrupts", for instance -- but doing so will only lend a superficial character to the story that it doesn't deserve. Take it as it comes, rather than trying to impose your own sense of what it is (or should be) about. Find out what it means for you after you have read the thing and it has time to sink in. Then, like me, push it on your friends and relatives, because it's an excellent book, and my only complaint is to myself for waiting so long to read it.

EDIT: I read the first quarter of O Beulah Land, the second book in the series, and it was so awful I had to stop reading it and write a very negative one-star review. As I said in my final line of that review, "Screw it. I have better things to do with my time. I still heartily recommend Prisons, but would warn any curious readers away from O Beulah Land." The contrast in quality between these two books is shockingly stark, though I can see the hints of the two works being produced by the same author. As it happens, the second book in the series was written seventeen years before the first book -- this book -- and what I can only assume is the growth and maturing of the author's "voice" really shows.… (más)