Book #17 of 2020: All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell

Historical fiction does not get better than this. An enormous cast of characters and a dense web of events with global repercussions, all unspooling outward from Haiti at the end of the 18th century. I was flabbergasted by this novel. Each character is painted with master strokes, and each point of view is captured believably and situated within the complex political, economic, racial, religious, intellectual, and revolutionary realities of the era.

There are two more in the trilogy--but I shan't dive right in. This book was far too harrowing. Its literary merits are obvious and the scholarship and research in its formulation daunting. But there are extended passages of the most DeSadean brutality--nothing ahistorical, mind you--but this was a time of casual and elegantly contrived brutality. And Bell's prose scintillates when bringing the most exquisitely awful scenarios to vivid life. I need a break before part 2!

Book 1 of 2018

I read some short fiction by Bell back in the 80s--I believe in the Best American Short Stories series? The stories were of an obvious quality, so I wanted to read his more dense work, and of course there was All Souls' Rising...a novel with some substantial accolades and strong sales for literary fiction, and which I purchased in a thick quality paperback.

But several in-person interactions with the author proved him to be such an irredeemable arsehole--we're talking sexist and narcissistic and borderline sociopathic behavior--that I returned my purchased copy of that novel without reading it. I usually do my best to separate the art from the artist, but in his case I thought "fuck that guy and his novels!"

But still, I imagine some day I'll read the Haitian trilogy because the era and the history fascinate me, and as many writers and artists have proven over the years, one can be a dickhead and still create lasting works of merit.

While thinking about re-purchasing and trying All Souls' Rising, I noted Bell had published a shorter book with a tantalizing blurb about shamanism and entheogens in the modern Southwest. I thought I would try this first and see.

Bell I imagine read some Terrance McKenna or Dan Pinchbeck and scored some online mescaline powder or psilocybin spores, or maybe he took a ride on the salvia divinorum express and got woke to the thin membrane separating reality from Reality. The forgotten youthful proclivities of his generation came back--he re-read Castaneda and after binge-watching Breaking Bad one weekend Behind the Moon popped out of his aching skull.

The novel is pretty good. The way the alternate realities bleed together and coexist is done with technical skill and efficiency. The characters are confronted by layers of consciousness and reality and dreamworld as the post- or hyper- modern becomes fractured in a way that allows the eternal to bleed through.

But is Behind the Moon better than the books and authors linked and mentioned above? Is this novel capturing something happening in the continuing dawning of Aquarius? Is it exploring new understandings of the perennial philosophy or the necessity of a return to the sacred?

No. I have re-read Castaneda, and McKenna, and Pinchbeck. I found nothing worth the trouble of re-reading in Behind the Moon. But it may lead you to fruitful research if you fall down its bear-haunted cave.