Paulette Jiles: Enemy Women

Reviewed by PHILIPPA JAMIESON

Missouri was an oddity in 19th-century North America - it allowed slavery, while still being part of the Union. Neutral at the outset of the Civil War, it was soon overrun with Union and Confederate troops and became one of the war's fiercest battlegrounds.

Against this bloody backdrop, Enemy Women begins in the Ozark Mountains with a raid by a Union militia party. Eighteen-year-old Adair Colley and her sisters watch as the soldiers loot the house and then torch it, beat up their father and take him away.

The girls join a line of refugees trudging to a Yankee garrison 192km north, where there is some hope of safety. Along the way Adair is denounced as a spy, and thrown into a women's jail in St Louis.

It's Major William Neumann's job to extract confessions from the prisoners. He is frustrated by Adair's insolence and refusal to co-operate, but gradually becomes captivated by her, admiring her insistence on finding her father and returning home. An unlikely relationship springs up between the two, and sustains them when they are called in different directions.

I found the novel hard to get into - you could scrap the first chapter entirely. The lack of speech marks took some getting used to, and the inclusion of historical extracts from letters and documents of the period was interesting but distracting.

But there is breath-taking poetry embedded within the straightforward, steely narrative, and Adair's distinctive character propels the story forward. As her journey progresses, Adair grows wily, doing what she must to survive, becoming adept at spontaneously inventing plausible tales to explain herself.

In this first novel, Pauline Jiles holds the steadfast gaze of both the poet and the historian, illuminating the story with a sharp, clear light, and showing us a woman's experience of war that is just as gruelling as any man's.

Fourth Estate, $21.99

****

* Philippa Jamieson is a Dunedin freelance writer.