KEY POINTS:
Books can excite us for many reasons: plot, character, landscape - the list goes on. But sometimes, a novel comes along whose attraction lies in the power and realism of its language.
Certainly with Albert French's Cinder, written as it is in an antiquated Southern American drawl, it is the credible idiom that captivates the reader most, for it creates a wonderfully cadent style of writing that draws the reader ever more into the historical landscape of the plot.
Set in Banes, a small Mississippi town, in 1938, Cinder details the adult suffering of its titular protagonist, a black woman of mesmerising beauty and star-crossed fortune. The book opens with the funeral of her son, Billy Lee Turner, who's been found guilty of and executed for killing his young white neighbour, Lori Pasko. Here, though, death isn't, as it can so often be in life and literature, a gateway to renewal. In their separate and united grieving, the local townsfolk, the Pasko clan and Cinder discover that the divisions wrought by the murder have become more deeply entrenched by racial hostilities. And so, when Lori's father dies shortly afterwards, the town erupts in retribution and intolerance.
For Cinder, hope lies in her long-time beau Otis and their plans to escape to the big city; for the Banes residents, hope lies in overcoming their narrow-mindedness. It is left to the author's skilful crafting of plot and patois to show us whether either triumphs over circumstance.
Rich with a rhythmic vernacular that stirs up direct comparisons with William Faulkner's epic Southern novel As I Lay Dying, French's Cinder is a historical novel whose prose style will hook you into its dark plot about the economic, social and psychological impacts of racial segregation, and in so doing will deepen your dismay at the institutionalised injustice and bigotry. Amazing.
*Harvill Secker, $34.99
- Extra, HoS
