Madison Smartt Bell

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 show more 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. show less

Adrian Strother isn't a doctor, and he hasn't slept for some time. Nor can he for the three days that make up this novel. The reader is deposited in media res into Adrian's 1980s London world, which seems to have his American past catching up with him, and his inchoate future dwindling to the indivisible point which hath no points nor parts nor magnitude. He's a talented hypnotist with aspirations to the divine magic of Marsilio Ficino and (more particularly) Giordano Bruno. For much of this show more book he struggles with whether and how to care about the people closest to him, while his professional engagements produce surprising results, and his carefully-constructed interior world reaches its full momentum.

Doctor Sleep isn't a "thriller" as the HBJ jacket copy claims. It's more of a "love story" after the fashion of the two M. John Harrison novels I recently read as Anima. It combines the modern hermeticism of John Crowley's Aegypt books with the gonzo introspection of a Robert Irwin novel. Layer on the chatty readability and pell-mell plotting of an early Palahniuk book, and you'll about have it. But enough of comparisons.

The fast-reading story darkens severely towards its dawn. I caution interested readers against any alleged plot summaries, because although the story itself is given in a perfectly sequential first-person narrative, it all hinges on circumstances that are revealed in an elliptical manner to give them their greatest effect. One of the chief topics of the novel (and the title of the second of its three days) is the art of memory, and what a haphazard glosser might see as background is just as likely to be payoff.

There is certainly a Faust tale here, and much that can be read as allegory. It was the first book of Bell's I have read, but since he could deliver "more light" in this fashion, I won't make it the last. show less

I had formed a favorable interest in author Madison Smartt Bell on the basis of his novel Doctor Sleep, so when I stumbled across a bargain used copy of Master of the Crossroads, I picked it up, only to discover it was the second of a series of three novels. Then, in a squall of objective chance, I happened upon a used copy of this, the first one, just a few days later in a different location.

All Souls' Rising could hardly be more different than Doctor Sleep in scope, scale, setting, and show more subject. The artistry of the writer is, however, in similar evidence. The subject is the Haitian Revolution, and it makes for a very grisly story. Bell does not flinch from descriptions of atrocities and their traumatic effects. But he also leavens the tale with moments of beauty.

There are multiple central characters, with some being historical figures, most notably Toussaint Louverture, who would become (however briefly) the first black ruler of Haiti. The two characters who serve as the real eyes of the reader, however, are the middle-aged Doctor Hébert, just arrived from France on family business, and Riau, a black originally enslaved in Africa. Although Hébert's tale serves to open and conclude the novel, Riau's story is given in the first person, and provides a key counterpoint. There are some powerfully-drawn women characters as well: Nanon, Isabelle Cigny, and Madame Arnaud, among others.

The settings vary among plantation, town, and wilderness. Bell observes the manifold conflicts within the colonial society, and their political consequences. He also remarks religion; both the French Catholicism of the colons and the vodoun of the blacks are shown as capable of good and ill alike.

Bell also furnishes an apparatus to help the reader with context, and to discriminate the established facts from his fictional interpolations. There are a wide-angle expository preface and an appendix affording a "Chronology of Historical Events." In addition, a glossary supplies meanings for scores of French and Creole terms used in the book. (Brief phrases of French go untranslated in the story's dialogue, although more substantial statements get Englished in footnotes.)

Although harrowing at times, this novel was an ultimately satisfying adventure delivering a humane perspective on a tumultuous episode of modern history. show less

English professor and novelist Madison Smartt Bell's new book, Toussaint Louverture (Pantheon, 2007) is at once a biography of the Haitian Revolution's main leader and at the same time a remarkably useful overall history of that conflict. Louverture makes for an incredibly difficult subject given the paucity of objective sources on his life and legacy, but Bell has handled that dilemma carefully and well.

As Bell notes in his afterword, most portrayals of Louverture show "an extreme show more Toussaint: either a vicious, duplicitous, Machiavellian figure ... or a military and political genius, autodidact, and self-made man, a wise and good humanitarian who not only led his people to freedom but also envisioned and briefly created a society based on racial harmony, at least two hundred years ahead of its time." What Bell has - I suspect consciously - attempted to do here is tack toward the middle, showing Toussaint (to the extent possible) in his own context.

We don't get a great deal here about the motivations of the man, and to his great credit Bell has refrained from attempting to psycho-analyze his subject. Where there are speculations - and there are some, of necessity - they're carefully noted. In the absence of a huge amount of personal detail, Bell provides a fascinating and detailed account of the incredibly complicated politics of Saint Domingue during the years of revolutionary conflict. The balance of power seemed to be constantly shifting (both between and amongst the groups within the colony and with the various European powers), and Bell has managed to recreate the essence of that without bogging the book down. I do wish that he'd included more about the relationship with the fledging United States, including the support offered by the Adams administration during the early years of the rebellion.

Louverture was and remains an impossible figure to pin down. Was he in fact out to secure an independent St. Domingue? If so, why not declare it (he insisted throughout that he remained loyal to France)? Why did he fall into the trap that led to his arrest and deportation? These questions, unfortunately, will probably never be answered. But Bell's book provides a fresh examination of these and other issues, and is an important introduction to its subject. Recommended.

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