By Paul Carrier
To describe Fallen Land as a Civil War tale is a bit risky; the classification is simultaneously misleading and right on target.
Taylor Brown’s novel is set in the South during the last year of that conflict. Yet it does not focus on posturing politicians, garrulous generals or ghastly battles. There is no mention of strategy or tactics, of goings-on in Washington or Richmond, although the destruction of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea figure as backdrops.
Instead, we find 17-year-old Ava and Callum, a 15-year-old horse thief, joining forces in a desperate bid to evade marauders, highwaymen and a notorious bounty hunter in the Blue Ridge Mountains, as the two orphans try to escape from a surreal wasteland. A massive black stallion named Reiver is their only traveling companion.
At 273 pages, Fallen Land is concise, but it overflows with so many narrow escapes, violent confrontations and murderous encounters that the fleeing teenagers and the desperadoes who pursue them seem to occupy a much larger stage than the one Brown has provided.
This is Brown’s first novel, but boy, does this Georgia native know how to write. (A quibble: an occasional lapse into obtuse language. I’m quite sure I’d never seen a door described as having a “rhombic shape” before.) Believable characters, a spellbinding plot, crackling dialogue dipped in a convincing vernacular, and a nightmarish setting are on display. The author casts an otherworldly spell over the entire enterprise.
The bad guys hereabouts are a truly venomous bunch who “had long ago forsaken the war of newspapers for the one they carried everywhere with them, and which had no colors, no sides, and which could be fit neatly to any new opportunity that presented itself: ambush, pillage, torture.” This is a time and a place of men so lost and debased that they have “nothing but viciousness to keep them alive.”
It may be a cliché to describe a novel as unforgettable, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Fallen Land deserves that characterization, with its breathtaking mix of romance and courage and grit in the face of abominable cruelty, war-induced madness and senseless death.
And yet there are saving graces, even in this hell on earth. Brown continually mesmerizes with the lyricism of his prose, particularly when it comes to describing the natural world.
When Callum spots a flock of migrating geese overhead, he eyes “the gentle working of their wings, long-feathered for wind riding, and the neatly tucked pairs of webbed feet. The bottle-shaped contour of necks and bodies so sleek cutting through the sky, and hollow-boned, like something God-made of the truest reckonings.”
Brown offers up a love story in a setting that probably conveys the horrors of the Civil War, from a civilian point of view in the rural South, more intimately and convincingly than any nonfiction account could do.
We often visualize the Civil War as “a big, bilateral war with clear sides,” but that can be misleading, Brown said in a 2015 interview with writersbone.com. There were renegade bands and "outrages of every kind on both sides." Brown said he was intrigued by the idea of "a world where sides and loyalties were so muddled they hardly mattered. Everyone was a possible friend, a possible threat. Fear was everywhere.”
Blessed with a theme that is loosely reminiscent of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Fallen Land is a novel in which even secondary characters are indelible and the story line zigzags at the speed of a stallion in full gallop. Saddle up for a truly memorable ride.
Taylor Brown’s novel is set in the South during the last year of that conflict. Yet it does not focus on posturing politicians, garrulous generals or ghastly battles. There is no mention of strategy or tactics, of goings-on in Washington or Richmond, although the destruction of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea figure as backdrops.
Instead, we find 17-year-old Ava and Callum, a 15-year-old horse thief, joining forces in a desperate bid to evade marauders, highwaymen and a notorious bounty hunter in the Blue Ridge Mountains, as the two orphans try to escape from a surreal wasteland. A massive black stallion named Reiver is their only traveling companion.
At 273 pages, Fallen Land is concise, but it overflows with so many narrow escapes, violent confrontations and murderous encounters that the fleeing teenagers and the desperadoes who pursue them seem to occupy a much larger stage than the one Brown has provided.
This is Brown’s first novel, but boy, does this Georgia native know how to write. (A quibble: an occasional lapse into obtuse language. I’m quite sure I’d never seen a door described as having a “rhombic shape” before.) Believable characters, a spellbinding plot, crackling dialogue dipped in a convincing vernacular, and a nightmarish setting are on display. The author casts an otherworldly spell over the entire enterprise.
The bad guys hereabouts are a truly venomous bunch who “had long ago forsaken the war of newspapers for the one they carried everywhere with them, and which had no colors, no sides, and which could be fit neatly to any new opportunity that presented itself: ambush, pillage, torture.” This is a time and a place of men so lost and debased that they have “nothing but viciousness to keep them alive.”
It may be a cliché to describe a novel as unforgettable, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Fallen Land deserves that characterization, with its breathtaking mix of romance and courage and grit in the face of abominable cruelty, war-induced madness and senseless death.
And yet there are saving graces, even in this hell on earth. Brown continually mesmerizes with the lyricism of his prose, particularly when it comes to describing the natural world.
When Callum spots a flock of migrating geese overhead, he eyes “the gentle working of their wings, long-feathered for wind riding, and the neatly tucked pairs of webbed feet. The bottle-shaped contour of necks and bodies so sleek cutting through the sky, and hollow-boned, like something God-made of the truest reckonings.”
Brown offers up a love story in a setting that probably conveys the horrors of the Civil War, from a civilian point of view in the rural South, more intimately and convincingly than any nonfiction account could do.
We often visualize the Civil War as “a big, bilateral war with clear sides,” but that can be misleading, Brown said in a 2015 interview with writersbone.com. There were renegade bands and "outrages of every kind on both sides." Brown said he was intrigued by the idea of "a world where sides and loyalties were so muddled they hardly mattered. Everyone was a possible friend, a possible threat. Fear was everywhere.”
Blessed with a theme that is loosely reminiscent of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Fallen Land is a novel in which even secondary characters are indelible and the story line zigzags at the speed of a stallion in full gallop. Saddle up for a truly memorable ride.
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