The structure established in the first two volumes of Madison Smartt Bell's saga of the Haitian revolution leads to this final book accounting in parallel both the political demise and the later death of Toussaint Louverture, the greatest leader and possibly the architect of history's only successful national slave rebellion. Don't come to this book looking for happy endings. It does supply outcomes and denouements regarding the various characters who have been so vividly established in the earlier phases of the narrative.

Military operations are a chief focus of this book, with two of its four main sections named for particular sites of battle in the conflict by which French General Charles LeClerc sought to reconquer the island on behalf of Napoleon's imperial government. A quartet of French army captains are the most focal of the new characters to be introduced in this last volume. On the whole, these four are not sympathetic characters, although their individual stocks may rise and fall in the estimation of the reader.

The core theme of this book is abortion, applied to the political aspirations of the nation that would become Haiti, and somewhat shockingly emblematized in an episode involving one of the principal characters. In this manner it follows and synthesizes the themes of death and birth that characterized the first and second books respectively.

The books of this trilogy were published over a span of eight years. My reading, with pauses in between volumes, took merely eight months. But it was still a major reading project, furnishing me with an absorbing and enlightening fiction, grounded in genuinely tragic history.

http://moloch981.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/il-napoleone-nero/ ( )