Brave Enemies (review)

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Robert Morgan. Brave Enemies. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003. 352 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. Robert Morgan's latest novel is his best, for Brave Enemies transforms regional events into an intense love story that dramatizes the sweeping history of the American Revolution in the South. In a wooded pasture known as Cowpens, North Carolina, the novel begins with the horrific battle on January 17, 1781. The New York Times Book Review critic Will Blythe observes that Morgan "writes terrifically well of battle, portraying the tactics, equipment and close-range terror of 18m C fighting." By the end of the prologue, the patriot narrator is seriously wounded and talking wildly. Morgan's beginnings are consistently praised. Katherine Whittemore, who reviewed Morgan's previous novel This Rock for The New York Times declared that prologue "hellbent and excellent" and confided that she still "hasn't shaken" the opening death scene of Masenier in "the harrowing" Gap Creek. In contrast to these novels, the structure of Brave Enemies is a complex memory loop. The climatic battle covers the last third of the novel, and at the exact moment in the battle when the earlier events were narrated, for the first time in my reading history, I eagerly turned back to re-read the prologue. The subtle foreshadowing and intentional ambiguity of the opening became vivid. In an interview by Book (November 2003), former President Jimmy Carter, whose own new novel shows the "interconnected" complexity of the Revolution in the Deep South, praises "the sterling start" of Morgan's book. In the final story of Morgan's second collection, The Mountains Won't Remember Us, the author began to write with great authority from the point of view of a woman. Morgan has said that one of his greatest strengths as a writer is being a good listener. Influenced by the voices of his own mother and aunts and Thomas Wolfe's Mama in the novella The Web ofEarth, Morgan's story set the standard for his "voicedriven " fiction and the women protagonists who followed. After Petal, in The Hinterlands, came the even fuller voices of the protagonists in his novels—Ginny's luxurious voice in The Truest Pleasure, influenced by the King James translation of the Bible and perhaps Jean 84 Ritchie's musical voice, and Julie's unconfident, stripped-down voice in Gap Creek. After the prologue of Brave Enemies, Morgan immediately personalizes history by introducing his vibrant sixteen-year-old narrator Josie Summers whose voice is clear and straightforward. In a letter to Algonquin, author Reynolds Price says, "One of the rarest of Robert Morgan's many gifts is his ability to embody the minds and voices of strong women. ... Josie. . . is Morgan's richest yet, and her story is steadily compelling." In this novel, Josie's step-father arrives when she is still a girl. At first she feels safe and happy to sit on his knee and be held even when his hands brush across her chest. But, Josie's stepfather also stomps on terrapins: "Let that be a lesson, Josie... Can't nothing hide in this world." Josie is competent and hardworking—even when she has to "scoop up the bloody pieces' of the step-father's terrapin mess. But while he lounges about, he works her harder than her mother had. When she is fifteen and her body has developed, the step-father follows her with his eyes. Once when he tries to take hold of her, she kicks his ankle and refuses to apologize even at her frightened mother's request. In a vibrant and telling incident, the stepfather carries Josie to the corn crib, tells her to shuck and shell three bushels of corn, and then he locks her in. Josie's anger sets her to work shelling as well as trying to pry the latch open. The realistic details live up to Whittemore's esteem for "the resonant" and "moving" prose of This Rock. She adds that "no one writes with more rough, intuitive grace about tending crops and tending animals. In this passage the corn shelling details heighten the suspense of how Josie will get...