Many kinds of human bondage
Soul Catcher
By Michael White
Morrow, 418 pp., $24.95
The Song Before It Is Sung
By Justin Cartwright
Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $24.95
The Mapmaker’s Opera
By Béa Gonzalez
St. Martin’s, 277 pp., $24.95
Certain books have to include certain lines. An adventure novel set in the golden age of gunslinging, for example, must have "The bullet's got to come out" and "We don't take kindly to horse thieves around these parts." It should also provide foulmouthed, wall-eyed baddies and a manly, yet complex, hero. Michael White's "Soul Catcher" has all of these -- and fanatical John Brown for good measure. "I would kill them ten times over if I thought it would end this," Brown rages at Augustus Cain, the novel's hero. "I would kill you with no more thought than a man would give to crushing a flea."
Slavery is the foulness that Brown has pledged to erase and that has contaminated Cain, a slave catcher, or "soul catcher," who reluctantly agrees to track the runaway female slave of a Virginia plantation owner. Cain's own father, a Virginia farmer, "treated his Negroes . . . with the full knowledge of . . . how much he had invested in each in terms of food and clothing, doctoring and training." He was, in his son's view, a good owner, whereas Eberly, the powerful tobacco planter obsessed with recapturing the beautiful Rosetta, is a brutal, rapacious one. Cain, for his part, loves his horse best of all and is just doing a job. That comfortable situation changes, however, when he finds Rosetta and the two of them, along with a couple of Eberly's goons, head back for Virginia from Boston.
Things were bound to get complicated: Cain reads Milton, calls his horse Hermes, and is haunted by memories of war and of the murdered Indian girl he loved. He is given to maudlin introspection, which occasionally bloats the narrative. Action is never far away, however, and White manages it well. "Soul Catcher" is not Guy Vanderhaeghe's "The Last Crossing," a novel that could ruin you for any subsequent search epic, but White ratchets up the suspense just when he should, gives horses and gunshot wounds due prominence, and has such a fine ear for dialogue that you forgive him the occasional lapse ("homemade moonshine"?).
Justin Cartwright's "The Song Before It Is Sung" is also a novel of conscience and duty, idealism and self-delusion, but one so sensitive and elegiac that it practically tranquilizes its calamitous era -- Nazi Germany -- on the page. This may be Cartwright's intention, to suspend events for our examination. He does so with flawless elegance, moving back and forth between past and present as his protagonist, Conrad Senior, obsessed by Axel von Gottberg, one of the participants in the failed 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, searches out anything to do with the German officer's life and grisly execution. (The novel is largely based on the friendship between philosopher Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, a German Rhodes scholar who returned to Germany in 1934 and was hanged for his part in the assassination plot.)
Conrad has inherited the papers of his Oxford mentor, Elya Mendel, with instructions to uncover the truth about von Gottberg, the friend whom Mendel finally condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. Mendel makes that judgment early on, while "Axel is on a steamer heading for New York . . . to talk to FDR, to save Germany from its appalling lapse of taste." The novel is full of such exquisitely biting asides, and Cartwright's portrait of Oxford's cloistered coziness and of von Gottberg's aristocratic world are models of damning irony.
Behold the handsome playboy Prussian, his understanding wife and beautiful children, model rulers of their feudal Mecklenburg estate. That is the real Germany, von Gottberg insists to Mendel, an assertion that this dark, often brutal novel contradicts. But I was left with a nagging question. How does a supremely tasteful, impeccably mannered novel make the point that taste and manners don't amount to much? It's unfair to criticize "The Song Before It Is Sung" for not being, say, a straightforward thriller, but reading Cartwright's almost dreamlike depiction of the assassination attempt, I couldn't help recalling a similar scene in Robert Wilson's "The Company of Strangers" (2001) that -- well, just give yourself a treat and read it.
There's plenty of tragedy -- personal and political -- in Béa Gonzalez's "The Mapmaker's Opera," but it is the kind that makes you cheer as the curtain falls on picturesque death and destruction. In late-19th-century Seville, sweet-natured Diego Clemente, the illegitimate son of a local grandee, finds refuge from his mother's bitterness in books, particularly in James Audubon's "Birds of America." Several heartbreaks and humiliations later, Diego finds himself in the Yucatan, on the eve of the Mexican revolution, working as an assistant to renowned American naturalist Edward Nelson and falling in love with Sofia, another bird artist and incurable romantic.
Readers leery of magic realism may be repelled by the novel's opening pages, but Gonzalez quickly trades coyness for straightforward storytelling laced with welcome acidity. Describing Masses for Seville's prominent dead, she writes of "souls siphoned from purgatory by the prayers of those below" while a friend of Diego's reminds him that "in Spain only the clergy eat well." Mexico provides the narrator with fewer darts of this kind, but that is understandable. There's a revolution to start.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com. 