The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor
Blue Door, $38.99
An enormously worthy and well-intentioned novel, strengthened by its ethical content, burdened by the very same ethical content. Loyal Ledford is the orphaned son of a drunk. He battles his way up from poverty, proves himself in gory Pacific battles during World War II, marries the manager's daughter at the glass factory where he works.
Sounds like a cliché? A fair number of situations and relationships in this book are clichés, respectfully and competently though Chicago's Glenn Taylor evokes them.
Ledford feels unfulfilled. His life has become "a game of forgetting". With the help of distant and distinctive rellies, called the Bonecutter Twins (Taylor's names are never dull) he sets out to manufacture marbles - as in kids' play.
Far more provocatively, in 1940s West Virginia, he sets out to establish a workplace where blacks and whites are treated on terms of total equality.
Racism instantly raises its myriad horrid heads. And they are horrid: there's nothing complex about the author's moral view.
Those supporting Marrowbone and its ideals are by definition virtuous and brave. Those opposing it are red-necked, black-hearted, yellow-bellied and sometimes purple-nosed.
There are threats, sneers, divided loyalties. Ledford and his allies never flinch. A racially mixed gym is set up. There are boycotts of segregated restaurants, especially one whose cartoon-loathsome owner uses a cattle prod on a black demonstrator.
Associated major political events step past. Police club marchers in Alabama; Martin Luther King is murdered; Walter Cronkite speaks approvingly of Marrowbone; Vietnam alters a nation's attitude towards institutionalised violence.
Meanwhile, characters find ingenious ways to win on the horses, to drown an entire town, to kill slugs with condiments.
The Bonecutter Twins stalk around like backwoods guardian angels, occasionally dressed in bearskins. Tankerloads of whiskey get drunk.
After a boy is deliberately run over, things swell towards a shotgun- toting, brake-cable-cutting, bridge-rail- smashing vigilante justice, plus a few fingers lost in a blast furnace as a gratuitous coda. Oh, and there's the throat-slitting after that.
If the morality is black and white, the writing is red and violet. Marrowbone throbs with muscular Hemingway sentences, consciously biblical cadences, a plethora of imagery where almost every mundane event holds a major and marvellous message.
There are a heap of good intentions, a crowd of good people, an abundance of good deeds and good outcomes. Indeed, there's a ... good deal too many good things.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
