The Scribe
Matthew Guinn
Norton hc, 292pp
$25.95 US
ISBN: 978-0-393-23929-4
Set in 1881 Atlanta during the early days of the New South, The Scribe delves with depth and subtlety into the many cross-currents flowing at that time and eddying into ours.
When hideous murder threatens the success of the International Cotton Exposition, itself a set-piece that may well determine Atlanta’s survival into post-war changes, a detective banished by a political smear is lured back to the city from a small mountain town to solve the case off the books, as quickly and quietly as possible.
He’s to work with Atlanta’s first black homicide detective, something only he is willing to do, it seems. Thus we see racial tension at the heart of this novel, which examines dark stains from the Plantation Era that refuse to be expunged. Even today we cannot erase those indelible crimes, fears, hatreds, and ambitions. Even today politics stirs prejudice to stampede support and votes via scare tactics and unwarranted claims. In The Scribe we see that none of this is ever new.
Serial murders continue, each seemingly worse, each of-a-piece with something that refuses to die. Letters carved into foreheads are spelling out a slow communication of refusal, denial, and hate. Who or what ever is doing this strikes them as something new, perhaps spawned by the recently-finished war, maybe created along with the rebuilding of Atlanta, of the South. As the detectives stalk this creature, we witness political struggles, divisive views, and conflicting emotions at war in the very concept of a New South. Many cannot give up on the Old South, as remains true today. Others are lost in rubble or confused by unexpected reconstruction. It is a time of vision trying hard to organize chaos into something better-suited to survive a new era’s demands and imperatives.
The closer the detectives get to the killer, the worse become pressures from above and below them. Doing the right thing might mean committing crimes. Upholding the law too assiduously might mean upsetting the entire future of what was once Dixie. Each man must face his own inner conflicts, then match them to those around him.
We see Joel Chandler Harris, General Sherman, and other historical people both in cameo and participating in full scenes. We learn at the end that this novel uses real events and settings, albeit in conflated form, to enhance the unity of the fiction. Quinn’s choices are savvy and used brilliantly. He deploys fact into fiction’s ranks with aplomb, never sacrificing one for the other, always enhancing, synergizing, and completing what might, in lesser hands, become fumbled, shattered.
No character rings false and each is human, with admirable qualities and possibly-fatal flaws. There are heroics, and grand scenes, but all are handled on a human scale, believable and genuine details supporting every word and move.
Masterful, elegant, and concise, the writing remains superb throughout and the material is both compelling on a story level and important on many real world levels. By cleaving to the human, by adding slight touches of possible supernatural interference, by expatiating in wonderful dialogue intelligent views pro and con, this novel elevates the discussion of politics, race relations, crime, justice, psychology, love, loss, redemption, sorrow, realism, friendship, professionalism, greater goods, lesser evils, immigration, pride, nihilism, narcissism, random plans and planned accidents, and a host of other sober matters that a dram of Jameson’s might lubricate.
By all means, read this book and do yourself some good while having an intensely good time. Strongly recommended.
/ Djinn
