The Silent
By Jack Dann
(The Sydney Morning Herald, 12/06/99)
From Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the American Civil War has provided the setting for much memorable literature, and any addition to it has some tough competition to face.
Jack Dann's The Silent, however, has more in common with other 'war' novels such as Kosinski's The Painted Bird or J. G. Ballard's The Empire of the Sun. Like these two works, Dann's latest novel is narrated from the point of view of a child. More important, it shares their predilection for the surreal and grotesque, and the fact their themes and obsessions transcend the historical setting. These journeys into war are both personal and universal.
The year is 1862. Mundy, the child narrator, witnesses the murder of his parents and the burning of his home by Federal soldiers, the "bluebelly Yankee bastards". He escapes into the forest, where he meets a 'spirit dog' who is to appear sporadically throughout the narrative, keeping watch over him. Having lost his power of speech--a lack that has symbolically cut him off from the human world--, Mundy wanders through the gruesome spoils of war, surviving on what he steals from dead soldiers, and increasingly taking refuge in memories of his family and dreams. A series of adventures follow, including brief stints in the army and a procession of real and imaginary characters, including General Jackson, and 'spirits', like the Negro servant Jimmadasin, who only Mundy can see.
There is a solipsistic element to the narrator's world, insofar as his circumstances take on a universal character, and the landscape of war becomes an expression of an inner, collective nightmare. The episodes succeed each other following a subjective and imaginary logic, often distorted by extreme emotional circumstances, exhaustion, fever and distress. As he insistently compares his experience to a dream, Mundy comes to inhabit a universe ordered around a hybrid of shamanism, superstitious Christianity and Negro spirituality, with plenty of old-fashioned Deep South apocalypticism thrown in. Dann is skillful at luring the reader into the character's strange interpretations of events. Mundy comes to believe he is a spirit, and that he can become invisible at will, although the reader is not presented with enough evidence of this, and the issue remains ambiguous. Is Mundy imagining things, seeking a flight from death in his fantastic ontology; or has the war plunged him into an altered, truer order of experience?
Dann's reconstruction of the period is exhaustive in its detail, lending a plausible historical skeleton to support the fantastic elements. With its literary flights, its Southern intonation and tragicomic momentum, Mundy's voice is a fine literary creation. The descriptions of battlefields and the aftermath of war are dizzying in their fleshiness and nightmarish richness. The overall feeling of hallucinatory flux will be familiar to readers of Dann's previous offering, The Memory Cathedral, his imaginary biography of Leonardo DaVinci.
Mundy is engaged on a mystical quest, and the narrative loosely observes the structure of a hero's journey and his awakening to knowledge. His new status may have allowed him to discern a hierarchy in the world, to perceive levels between the spiritual and the terrestrial. Yet he can never escape the world of the flesh. In fact, there is such an abundance of sensory information, such a plethora of dead, diseased and mutilated bodies, that the novel often reads like a mournful meditation on embodiment. A subdued moral outrage seeps into Dann's accounts of war, as if he himself was trying to make sense of the horror he describes and come to terms with the seemingly bottomless human capacity for destruction. Spirits and angelic visions are not portents of a better, otherworldly existence, but another manic element in a reality gone horribly wrong.
It is these elements, as well as the considerable power of Dann's storytelling, that raise The Silent above a mere exercise in world-building. In this book Dann has created an engaging and baroque realm, a place as enchanted as anything dreamed up by Tolkien, and as dark as a painting by Bosch.
Andres Vaccari
posted by Andres Vaccari @ 2:33 PM