Civil War vet has revenge in mind

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/09/2023 (1092 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Jean-Louis, dit John, Chenneville awakens from a coma after suffering a grievous head injury late in the American Civil War, his first hint that something else is amiss comes from his doctor’s order that “you are not to be troubled by anything untoward or negative, but your mind should, as it were, glide down the stream of health and healing undisturbed.”

Turns out something very untoward had occurred during Chenneville’s coma: the murder of his sister, her child and her husband by a madman serving in the Union army during the brutal guerilla war in Chenneville’s home state of Missouri.

Thus does Missouri-born, formerly Toronto-based and now Texas-residing author — and recipient of multiple Canadian literary awards — Paulette Jiles set her latest novel on a path toward the territory of several of her previous novels. Her new novel follows its protagonist on a long, meandering journey from the war-devastated Missouri of Jiles’s Writers’ Trust-winning 2002 novel Enemy Women to the impoverished and militarily occupied Texas of her 2016 novel News of the World, a finalist for the 2016 U.S. National Book Award that was made into a Tom Hanks movie.

Jean-Louis Chenneville, a member of Missouri’s dwindling Francophone minority with roots going back to the fur trade posts of New France, is the last of his line and driven by a need for revenge.

But his story is no shoot-em-up. Violence, when it occurs, is unexpected, sudden and usually inconclusive, with more attention paid to a series of encounters with war refugees, hardscrabble dirt farmers, weary fellow travellers, a friendly British telegraph operator and a dedicated lawman determined to thwart Chenneville’s revenge.

Random roadside encounters common in literary westerns (see virtually all of Cormac McCarthy) and Jiles makes each one memorable. Chenneville investigates his sister’s murder, tracks the murderer, endures winter storms in the hills of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), considers the possibility of love with a woman telegraph operator and meets the good, bad and ugly of post-war America.

Jiles is also a poet (she won the 1984 Governor General’s Prize for Poetry for her collection Celestial Navigation), and writes with flourishes of lyricism, as when Chenneville recalls swimming in the Missouri River: “He floated in the milk-warm blood of a nation, of many nations.” Later, passing through villages in the pine forests of East Texas, Chenneville sees the locals as “refugees, or people displaced by want, people who had abandoned failing farms, a cashless people hard as cartilage and bent on survival.”

Jiles also creates dialogue that sings, while ringing true to the characters and the time and place, as when a teenage girl who narrowly escaped murder tells Chenneville: “But you ain’t one of those sorry ratbags, are you? That have fed on the powers of darkness. You’re a good one.”

It’s a long trip from the Chenneville family farm near the Missouri River to the title character’s destination near San Antonio, but lovers of historical fiction, vivid characters and memorable language wouldn’t mind a few more detours en route.

Bob Armstrong indulges in road trips in real life and in his writing, including his Manitoba Book Award-winning 2021 novel Prodigies.