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2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.
Winner of the 2008 National Book Award
Matthiessen's Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature, and yet, as the author writes in a foreword of this reworking, with the publication of Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone, he felt, "after twenty years of toil... frustrated and dissatisfied." So after "six or seven" years of "re-creation"-rewriting many passages, compressing the timeline, shortening the work by some 400 pages and fleshing out supporting cast members (notably black farmhand Henry Short)-the three books are in one volume for the first time, and the result is remarkable.
Florida sugarcane farmer and infamous murderer-the latter bit according to legend, of course-Edgar J. Watson is brought to life through marvelous eyewitness accounts and journal entries from friends, family and enemies alike. Book One (formerly Killing Mister Watson) creates a vivid portrait of the untamed southwest Florida of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and recounts Watson's life-with questionable accuracy-beginning with his arrival in south Florida and replaying key events leading up to his being gunned down in the swamps. Watson, who stands accused of murdering a young couple who won't leave his land, is roundly despised and feared, so much so that parents frighten their children into obedience by threatening "a visit from Watson."
The second book takes place several decades after Watson's murder and relates the travails of Watson's son, Lucius, now a WWI veteran and scholar, as he tries to write a true account of his father's life. Lucius journeys back to his childhood home in search of answers from the same people who saw his father killed. As heinvestigates the contradictory claims and rumors (like that of a "Watson Pay Day," when Watson would murder his farmhands rather than pay them), he tracks down his long-lost brother, Robert, and learns a horrible family secret.
The final piece is perhaps the best, taking the form of Watson's chilling memoir. Recounting his life, from the years of paternal abuse right up until his jaw-dropping perspective on the day of his death, Watson reveals his strained relationship with his children, a personality crisis with his scabrous alter ego and the truth behind the many myths. Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it's difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and convincingly portrayed. When Watson delivers his final line, it's as close as most will come to witnessing a murder. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Humans have been busy in that import business ever since we began painting and telling stories -- stuffing the natural world with myths that have our fingerprints all over them. In his landmark survey, Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama showed how the Arcadian dream -- of living in harmony with a pastoral natural landscape -- has been one of our pervasive ideals. It stretches across cultures and time, appearing throughout visual art. We see it domesticated on suburban lawns and in national parks.
That fantasy had a darker counterpoint, however: it was a landscape of density and death. A place that doesn't redeem but dissolves toward entropy and the baser needs of fetid reproduction. The jungles of Conrad's Heart of Darkness were one such place. So are the gator-filled mangrove swamps and humid sawgrass of the Florida Everglades in Peter Matthiessen's astonishing Watson Trilogy, which, as it turns out, were never intended to be three novels, but one.
Matthiessen spent five or six years returning to that project to its original vision. It has now been republished by Modern Library as one long novel, Shadow Country, an appropriate title for an epic meditation on a landscape defined by rape, rupture, and the intermingling of races that were enlisted -- forcibly, or by the equally cruel leverage of their destitution -- to clear, tame, and make landscapes from Oklahoma to the Deep South worth something; or if that failed, to leave.
At 900 pages, Shadow Country is an imposing piece of reading, but the Novel -- the capital N feels appropriate here -- never lacks for momentum, let alone a grand character. E. J. Watson, its blond, brutal, hardworking, hubristic hero, is a close cousin to Thomas Sutpen, the volcanic center of William Faulkner's masterpiece Absalom! Absalom! Like Sutpen, Watson comes to a land that is not his own, haunted by his past -- in this case it's a murder -- and tries to impose a grand design that the land and the racial politics required to maintain it resist. Like Sutpen, Watson also spawns sons who try and fail to deal with their father's complicated, poisonous legacy. The only difference is that Watson is based on a real person whose life and death are confirmed by Florida history.
Edgar J. Watson was the son of a well-known South Carolina family who reportedly married five women and fathered ten children. Watson is shot down in cold blood in the book's opening scene by a posse of his neighbors, shortly after pulling his boat ashore one night. It's a riveting scene that ends with a horrendous image of a woman crawling under her house, "dragging her brood into the chicken slime and darkness."
The novel then cycles back to tell Watson's story in the voices of a dozen men and women who knew him (and watched him -- or helped him -- get shot) in riffs that feel as natural as if they were told across a porch as darkness falls. It's a bravura performance of serial impersonations that instantly keys us in to the racial tensions that simmered in that part of the world around the turn of the 20th century. We hear from Richard Hardin, an Indian who looks white; a mulatto named Henry Short and another man named Bill House, both of whom worked for a Frenchman who turned up in those parts in search of rare birds.
Together, with others, they tell how Watson appeared one day, clearly an outlaw of some sort. Florida's Ten Thousand Islands were full of people on the lam in those days -- "knife-mouthed piney-woods crackers," as one man describes them, "hollow-eyed under wool hats and them bony-cheeked tall women with lank black hair like horse mane." Watson possessed their toughness but also had grander ambitions than most -- and, crucially, had a way of getting people to do what he wanted. He bought up a piece of land no one had successfully farmed and began growing cane on it in 1894; he later brought his family along, only to flee when one too many murders occurred on his plantation.
The chorus of voices who relay this history to us sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Here is a place distrustful of outsiders, where people solved disagreements and even greetings with a gun and the instinct to steal and take from the land -- to deplete it, or import the outside world into it -- was looked down upon, vanquished with a tough-minded irony. One character remembers how, in the 1880s, travelers going down the rivers would see the Mikasuki Indians peering through the sawgrass: "Give you a funny feeling," the man says, "Made you think the Earth was watching, too." A preacher brought "the Lord to Everglade back in 1888 and took Him away again when he departed." Yachts begin coming down and mooring nearby and the people pull out the depth stakes. Watson, who is farming a piece of land said to be haunted, is expelled not once but twice.
The metaphors that Matthiessen's characters use reflect people living within the orienting sphere of nature -- people for whom the mere notion of an idea of an abstract Nature would be a Yankee joke. A woman is "small and flirty as a bird"; listening to you, a man says, Watson would "blink just once, real slow, like an old chewing turtle"; on the night Watson is shot, a nervous man is "buzzing with green flies in the heat." As the book progresses and outsiders begin entering the picture and try to parse Watson's legend -- like his son Lucius, a Ph.D. doing research on the South -- the novel's language evolves away from this natural ecology toward crisper, denatured cadences. It is surveying language; it is academic language; it is an outsider's language.
Stitching the three novels back together must have been nearly as mammoth a task as writing them to begin with. Matthiessen has bridged the gap as best as one can imagine, sawing a significant amount of historical information out of the section originally published as "Lost Man's River," a decision that draws his characters' voices to the fore and unfortunately reveals the adjectival paucity of Watson's first-person narration, which kicks in during Book Three and carries Shadow Country toward its climax. We all live in the gap between how we are perceived and the way we see ourselves. Somehow, though, Watson's voice doesn't sound right. The events leading up to this point prepare you for a man who would cuss language into a sprung poetry, like Peter Carey's Ned Kelly. Instead Watson sounds disappointingly like a businessman.
In the end, there is a sad truth to this planing down toward the literal in Shadow Country. Florida was becoming a business. As Matthiessen reminds the reader, Napoleon Broward was the new governor, "and his plan to conquer the Everglades for the future of Florida agriculture" got under way in 1906. What Watson was doing to the landscape, and to the people who worked for him, was about to happen on a much larger scale. It's something even he regrets. Late in the novel, Watson recalls seeing some Yankee men and their Indian guides dragging a 2,000-pound manatee in a dugout down the Shark River in a pine box. "What they wanted with that huge dismal creature and what became of it I never learned," he says. The image says volumes. The wildness of that world was about to be tamed -- or perhaps invented, as if that were possible -- and no one knew the violence that would likely require quite like E. J. Watson. --John Freeman
John Freeman's work has appeared in The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal and on NPR. He is completing a book on the tyranny of email for Scribner.
Anonymous
Posted November 8, 2009
Those who read literature for the Art will be emotionally swept away. The writing is absolutely biblical in its proportions, rhythm and voice. The characters live. The greatest literary masterpiece of the 20th Century.
Hillard Fried, Esq.
3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 25, 2010
Have to disagree with faultfinders. I loved this book. Couldn't wait to get back to it every night. An epic tale, combining the comedy of human foibles with almost inevitably unavoidable consequences that approach the tragic. We hear the story of one family, one character in particular, and multiple events, from the perspective of several voices, thus "the truth" keeps slipping and sliding as we are confronted with the eternal conflict between absolute beliefs and the relativity of truth when seen from someone else's eyes. The tone is pitch-perfect, the historical perspective surprisingly topical today; I regretted coming to the end.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 2, 2009
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This long and enormously interesting book is a reworking of the three separate volumes-a National Book Award Winner-published from 1990 to 1999 into a single book. I haven't read the original trilogy but if Matthiessen's goal in the revision was to clarify and coalesce the three parts, I believe he's succeeded admirably.
The story of the planter Edgar A. Watson takes place in the post-Civil War south into the turn of the 20th century. There is no mystery about the outcome since the denouement occurs in the opening pages of the book. But very quickly the true story, the parallel threads of the personal history of the central character as well as the growing pains of the region and the country leading up to the finale, is made clear. It's about one of the last frontiers in America told from many points of view and centering on a recurring theme of the movement of time and events as a river flows to the sea. In this telling the river is seen but so are the multiple strands and tributaries leading inexorably to the dramatic and tragic outcome.
Reviewers have pointed to Matthiessen's "stylistic range" and this was to me one of the most striking accomplishments of the book. Book I (based on Killing Mister Watson) is told as a continuing series of first-person observations and recollections of characters directly and indirectly involved in Watson's life and death. Here the voices-in dialogue and recitation-are unique, individuated and convincing. In the second book (based on Lost Man's River) the voice is now a third-person narration from the point of view of Lucius Watson, Edgar Watson's middle, adult son (he had at least ten children) as he sets about the arduous and dangerous task of riddling out the reasons and the perpetrators of his father's death. Was it a murder, an execution, a lynching, or suicide? Lucius is the gentle and bookish son most loving and loved by his father. He is also a lover of nature and here begin descriptions of the natural world that are far ranging and at times truly poetic. These images stand in contrast to the depictions of the horrors wrought on nature by encroaching development and the often breathtaking racist brutality of the Jim Crow Era. Finally in Book III (from Bone by Bone) we are brought full circle to Edgar Watson's story in his own words and through his own thoughts and opinions.
Edgar supplies the final pieces of the puzzle and yet he remains enigmatic to his last breath. The reader must draw his or her own conclusions as to his motivations. The character is so complex: simultaneously attractive and repellent, insightful and blind, nurturing and lethal, not to mention ingenious in his survival while hurtling, maddeningly toward self-destruction. If your standard for fiction is a story that stays with you long after the book is closed, Shadow Country should be on your list.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 24, 2009
"Shadow Country" is a massive re-rendering of the Watson legend. It covers the span of twelve years of E.J. Watson's legend in the Ten Thousand Islands of the Everglades. The Watson legend fuses story, myth, and a little history into a bizarre profile that makes the plantation owner flourish in his past and>? end up bullet-ridden deep in the swamps. Reports and rumors claim "Bloody Watson" was the killer of outlaw Belle Starr way back in 1889. He carries a large family from his prosperous homeland of South Carolina: a handful of wives and about a dozen children.
Matthiesen has combined his previous three tales ("Killing Mister Watson," "Lost Man's River," and "Bone by Bone") into "Shadow Country." The three part chronicles within "Shadow Country" take on a new perspective of the legend. However, the same outcome in Matthiessen's previous works is echoed; 33 slugs to the legend, myth, and body of a mysterious man. The three books begin with a third-person remembrance of E.J. Watson. Twelve characters relive the moments near the man. Watson's persona is in a gyre from the "Ill punch your nose off" written in his daughter's journal to a neighbor who recalls "Mister Watson had no interest in such hymns before his family come and he never had none after they was gone." Was Watson a family man or a fearless drunk? The ambiguity of the first book leaves many detailed memories, but more confusion in the construction of a mad-man.
In Book II, his son discovers his father's code for revenge. The backing of his skill with a firearm and his sad upbringing are discovered by Lucius. Initially, revenge seems to be the driving force behind the son's search for answers. No stone is left unturned in this episode of paternal anger. The words alone are dry and coarse, but collectively create a massive book of notes that reveal the Watson family's darkest secrets. Either the overwhelming facts of his family, or the frequent encounters with the land mongering lawyer Dyer, leads Lucius to set ablaze all his work. The truths and mysteries are gone. The persistent questioning by Lucius reads like a psychology report: "But if that was his plan, why.Was that just a bad mistake, as people said? Papa didn't make mistakes like that, not when he had the whole trip north.to think his plan through."
Book III is from E.J. Watson himself. An utter ending to the story told in truth. Speaking from the grave, unfortunately, makes the R.L. Stine to appear ahead his time. Matthiessen wants his character to have the fairy tale ending. The shadow surrounding his death is lifted. E.J, Bloody, Emperor Watson reflects on his mystery. The sugar plantation owner, the feared man, the exile, and the father lie to rest. While I wish there was a better way to end the story, Matthiessen allows first time readers of the legend to find the truth. The Everglades seem to swamp the story with an eerie sense, and an acrid tone.
In all, "Shadow Country" is a good story. The legend of E.J. Watson will live on forever through these books. Matthiessen combines three styles of writing into one cohesive rendering. The middle section lacked abundant excitement and the ending fell short of believability. Despite the perplexing point of views, the final piece of the Watson Legend series was a success. Matthiessen and "Shadow Country" are deserving of the National Book Award for this tremendous tale of untraveled lands and quick-to draw pioneers.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 26, 2011
Even a year later, I can't forget the characters, setting and intriguing plot from this book. I am a lifelong reader, and I think this is my favorite book. I've never been able to say such things before.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 20, 2012
A unique way of telling a story; multiple perspectives add layer upon layer to the story line
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.BearWT
Posted December 29, 2011
Beautifully written, facinating. I first heard of Mr. Watson while at the Smallwood store in Chokoloskee. Having read The Snow Leapord, a favorite, I had to pick up the book. Though lengthy, I couldn't put it down. Very informitave about Florida history as well as a facinating story of a Florida community.
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Posted December 27, 2010
dense
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 9, 2010
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Nearly nine-hundred pages long, Shadow Country is easily one of the longest books I've ever read. My first thought about Shadow Country was that it would be impossible for me to finish. I was wrong.
Peter Matthiessen is a master storyteller and master of the English language. He is especially gifted (or practiced) in creating texture; his words grind in scenes of tension and soothe in scenes of peace. In addition, his cast of characters - ranging from the pure and innocent to schizophrenic - might be the best I've ever enjoyed.
If you appreciate a good story and the English language at its best, read this book.
I found this book hard to follow and after the first 100 pages I have put it down and archived it on my nook. Maybe at a later date I will attempt it again.
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 11, 2009
Nat'l Book Award? Might have been good reading had 600 pages been left out. Repetitive, disjointed, annoying!!! I kept reading, thinking it would suddenly get interesting...but that was not to be! I was angry with myself for finishing it. What a waste of paper/trees! One of the worst books I've ever suffered through.
0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 30, 2009
Peter Matthiessen's great novel Shadow Country, the compressed och reshaped one-volume version of his three volumes in the Watson trilogy from the 1990s, has received so overwhelmingly positive praise for this final gigantic tome, that you may question the meaningfulness of adding something to the glorifying choir. Is this really a candidate to that much coveted title: The Great American Novel, that has been proposed by some reviewers?
I think there will always be readers finishing this 890 pages long novel with a feeling that this is one of the most intensely fascinating och purposeful books they ever read. It is undoubtedly a stunning project Matthiessen has undertaken. What person has been the object of such a penetrating writing as the legendary planter and killer E.J Watson from Florida, the only one owing a house in the Everglades: first three long novels and now this great compression, hovering over the whole project? Matthiessen must have been obsessed by this almost mythical figure, whose dark and puzzling destiny he so thoroughly tries to clarify.
Readers who like modern, intricate novels may perhaps not be so captivated by Matthiessen's slowly progressing narration with its often classical epic character, full of plain telling and illustrative details. This is Homeros in the prose epic line of our days, this is the historical books of the Old Testment, or the Icelandic sagas. It is very much written in the Tolstoyan tradition. In the main, Matthiessen seems to be a writer more interested in his characters, the principal ones as well as the smaller roles, and in the scheme of actions and events they are involved in, than he is in the literary language in itself, and its possibilities of artful creation. As an epic writer he is distinguished and exemplary, even though sometimes I found the story a bit too circumstantial and phlegmatic.
But that is not the whole truth. The novel is divided into three books, and particularly the first one is enormously skilfully written: persons concerned with the life of Watson are telling their fragments of memories in their own popular or dialectic language. This is no doubt more in the Faulknerian tradition; even though Matthiessen is mostly far from Faulkner, his circling possession of Watson's enigmatical och always escaping fate has a lot in common with the driving force behind Faulkner's stories as well as Faulkner's literary technique.
Matthiessen is especially of aesthetic delight in his suggestive and lyrical descriptions of nature and landscape. In this novel Florida and the Everglades get its literary monument in a prose epic, where man and nature, man in interplay with the forces of nature, are depicted in all colours between dazzling light and darkest tragedy. The magnificent end of the novel, where the telling is dissolved into short, thinly spread fragments of prose, concludes with the enigma of human life, as the story unmasks it, expressed in a poetical line: "this world is painted on a wild dark metal."
Melville's Moby Dick, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Updike's Rabbit Saga - well, it's probable among these outstanding works Matthiessen's Shadow Country will be classified. It is a great novel of Florida, but also, as a whole, of the U.S.A. with its turbulent history of blood and violence, lynching and destruction, and, finally, it is a lasting emblem of man's fate in an indescribably chaotic world.
Anonymous
Posted May 10, 2009
I enjoyed this book more than any that I have read in years. The characters will stay with you long after you've read the final words. I read the Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone contain 400 more pages of this story. I plan to read them as soon as possbile.
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Posted February 9, 2009
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This book is a masterpiece, but don't trust this ordinary reader. Just look at the book jacket and read the quotes from such luminaries as Oates, Bellow, and Dillard. They are in awe of this book and so am I. You'd think that a book which begins with the story's climax--the murder of its protagonist--wouldn't be able to keep you interested for nearly 900 pages. In fact, I have lugged this book around everywhere and read it whenever I have a moment to spare. I have about a hundred pages left and truly do not want it to end. The author's note articulates Matthiessen's own epic journey as a writer, rewriting and editing this saga. I found reading it very helpful as it provided insight as to why a writer would rewrite and reframe a story that had already been succesfully published. This is, without a doubt, one of the most substantive and ambitious books I have ever read. It so chock full of narrative information and visual description that I find myself rereading chapters just to be able to absorb it all. The langague is beautiful which is also what keeps you hypnotized as a reader. The one characteristic I would point out--to you women out there--is that this book is really about men and the male psyche. Although there are many female characters, their characters are not really explored in great depth. You have to read Oates or Arnow for that. On the other hand, the shifting perspectives in the book are surprising and satisfying. In the first book, each chapter is told from a different chracter's point of view; the second book is told from the son's point of view; and, the third and most riveting book is related from the main character's point of view--highly original and engaging. This is the first book I have read by Matthiessen. He is truly a master storyteller.
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Posted February 9, 2009
While I can understand some readers preferring the original 3 separate novels, which I read when they were originally published, I found this "retelling" a tremendous achievement. The distilling of the source material into one-volume provided me with a better read this time around. I was captivated for the entire nearly 900 pages; the history of the area, the poetic prose which puts Matthiessen's love of natural history to great effect and especially being able to enjoy the change in points of view as each "book" flowed into the next. This joins my list of all-time favorites and I look forward to a re-read at some point of this American epic.
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Overview
2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.
Winner of ...