This short novel, which shifts across the period 1830-1930, covers ground explored by Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. The book opens with a vivid prologue about the digging of a well on a remote farm in 1830. However, its connection to the remainder of the book is unclear and it could function as a separate short story.

The central character of the book is Ginny, first met as a fourteen-year old who marries her mother’s second cousin, the much older Linus Lancaster, and in the years before the Civil War is taken to his ‘mansion’ in Paradise, Kentucky [‘ninety miles from nowhere’]. Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be very different from what he had promised.

This story, which follows Ginny’s life, is bracketed within shorter, first person sections narrated by other characters in the story. On first reading this was not easy to follow or to relate the individual narrators to one another. Linus is a typical slave owner who abuses Ginny and his slaves and raises and dispatches pigs with ferocity. His determination to coarsen and brutilise Ginny, not least through his forcing her to kill the pigs that following their release eventually become feral, is graphically described. Ginny gradually takes on the characteristics of her husband but her maltreatment of her two slaves, Cleome and Zinnia enters the story insidiously, making it all the more horrific given the rather reasoned voice of the narrator. In turn the sisters, who might be Linus’ children, exact an appalling retribution on Ginny and her husband.

The very dark storyline is mixed with elements of magic realism through the stories of another slave, Alcofibras, as well as plot aspects that might be aspects of Ginnie’s imagination or hallucination. Alcofibras’s storytelling offers Ginny her only consolation on the farm. Periodically characters dressed in buckskin and feathers briefly appear offering a rather mystical link between different sections of the book.

In contrast to Linus whose character seems oversimplified, Laird’s descriptions of minor characters is exceptional, none better than Ginnie’s loving and sympathetic crippled father and Lucious Wilson, a farmer in Indiana on whose land she lives for over half a century after her escape from Paradise and whose devotion she is unable to reciprocate.

The complex relationship between the three women is very well described; at first Ginny treats the girls as her sisters or daughters, drawing on her family upbringing. After six years without fathering a child, Linus tires of her and begins to abuse the two sisters. At this point Ginny’s behavior towards them changes and she beats and abuses them. This change in her character may be hard to accept although her isolation and despair, coupled with her disgust and probable jealousy, may all feed into her behavior.

In contrast to the women, both Linus and his ex-business partner, Bennett Marsden, are less confidently drawn. Linus because he is so stereotypical and Marsden because he remains so unaware of what is happening on the farm. The reason for his reappearance, in chains, late on in the story is unclear.

The events of Ginny’s later years are a significant contrast to her life on the farm although her guilt and self-disgust remain with her throughout her long life [‘They say once you’ve had the shackle on you it never comes off’]. This section of the book affords an opportunity to see Ginny through the eyes of those around her, a device that the author exploits very successfully. This is particularly welcome since the events that Ginny has lived through have damaged her to the core and made her an unreliable narrator.

As would be imagined, a story steeped in slavery, violence, sexual- and emotional abuse is not an easy read, and is accentuated by Laird’s intensely concentrated style. There are few references to particular historical events so that the story can be read as a general statement about slavery and violence begetting violence.

An evocative and distressing tale of slavery and the way violence begets violence.

Left on a bench outside the EE Shop.

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