Love being in the state he's in
Andro Linklater
COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier Sceptre, £6.99, pp. 438 For all the glamour of California, the grandeur of Montana and the glitz of Hawaii, I would rate North Carolina as the most attractive of America's 50 states. It wins not just for its pine-covered sand- hills and rolling Blue Ridge mountains, but for the still-surviving character of its mountain inhabitants — large-hearted and narrow-minded — the last holdouts of those tobacco-chewing, Bible-reading, gun-toting, whisky-guzzling homesteaders whose stiff-necked independence became America's hallmark.
Thus, in setting his Civil War novel in such surroundings, Charles Frazier begins with one great advantage and sensibly he makes the most of it. The theme of Cold Mountain, a soldier from the wars returning, is older than literature itself, and the journey of the wounded Inman making his way back to his home and his sweetheart, Ada Monroe, belongs to a story-telling tradition that began with The Odyssey. But it was Frazier's extraordi- nary evocation of the land and people that made his book the most lauded first novel in recent time on its publication last year.
Here, for example, is his miniature of Esco Swanger, an Appalachian farmer:
He was bent over trying to cotter a cart- wheel with a peg he had whittled from a locust branch, driving it in with a hand sledge. As Ada walked to him from the road,
he stood and set down the sledge and leaned forward against the cart, gripping the top- board two-fisted. There appeared to be no great odds between the color and hardness of his hands and the boards, He had sweated through his shirt, and as Ada drew near, she drew in his smell, which was that of wet pot- tery. Esco was tall and thin with a tiny head and a great shock of dry, grey hair which roached up to a point like the crest on a tit- mouse. He welcomed the excuse to quit working and walked Ada to the house, passing through the fence gate into the yard. Esco had used the fence for hitching rack, and the pointed tops of the palings had been cribbed away to splintered nubs by bored horses.
These exact, story-teller's word-pictures flow into one another so seamlessly and seductively that it is almost impossible not to believe in the 19th-century landscape which they create. And because it is so credible, Ada's domestic life, in which every meal must be grown, gathered or hunted, acquires an excitement and a sense of achievement as palpable as Inman's Odyssean adventures. Above all, their confusedly felt and barely expressed love grows against this Arcadian backdrop with a slow, inexorable power whose culmination is one of almost intolerable poignancy. Indeed, if there is one quality that is more impressive than his scene-setting, it is Frazier's immaculate pacing of his narrative so that a potential weakness — the separation of the two protagonists becomes its integral strength. In short, the appearance of so beguiling a novel in paperback offers a perfect solution to the problem of holiday reading.
It does, however, suffer from a major flaw, and one which is inescapable from any attempt at a realistic recreation of the past. When Frazier periodically quotes genuine 19th-century descriptions of the landscape, you realise how closely his style trembles on the verge of pastiche. Like a Laura Ashley frock, attempting to distract attention from 20th-century zips and fabrics with period details borrowed from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, his spare modern prose is dotted with deliberate archaisms — `sordor' for squalor, that 'cribbed' for nibbled, and what I think must be a mistake, 'rooks' as a folk-word for ravens —and the result is something closer to whimsy than authenticity. Occasionally too, when secret societies like the Red String Band appear, or flocks of passenger pigeons darken the sky, there is the smell of undigested research. And yet I find I have to push myself even to carp that much. When all is said and done, this is a debut of which any novelist would be proud.
His publishers and readers will want him to write more of the same, but I hope he resists. Appealing though reproduction of the past may be, whether in frocks or furniture or fiction such as this, it is for its makers a creative cul-de-sac. In his feel for the rhythm of a story, Frazier shows himself to be a genuine author, and one too good to let his imagination be corralled into dead men's patterns.
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