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Summary
Summary
From the author of the award-winning novel The Black Flower comes a novel about a Confederate soldier returning home to find that life-and love-will never be the same.
On a balmy spring day in 1865 Gawain Harper trudges toward his home in Cumberland, Mississippi, where three years earlier he had boarded a train carrying the latest enlistees in the Mississippi Infantry. Unmoved by the cause that motivated so many others, he had joined up only when Morgan Rhea's father told Gawain that he would never wed his beloved Morgan unless he did his part in the war effort. Now, upon his arrival, he discovers post-war life is far from what he expected. Morgan has indeed waited for him, but before they can marry there are scores to be settled. For in his hometown yet another battle is being waged, and the enemy is not the occupying Federal troops, but Cumberland's own King Solomon Gault, a deranged, manipulative man on a mission to restore his own brand of justice to a community turned upside down. As Gawain struggles to find a way to avenge the Rhea family's honor, he is drawn into an inexorable showdown with Gault that once again pits South against North, and dignity against defeat.
Written with scrupulous respect for historical accuracy, The Year of Jubilo brilliantly evokes a time of sorrow and defeat, of anarchy and violence, and also of hope and rebuilding. A poignant and sweeping novel that reveals the human side of one of the most trying and pivotal moments in American history, it is sure to catapult Howard Bahr to the top rank of American novelists.
Author Notes
Howard Bahr teaches English at Motlow State Community College in Tullahoma, Tennessee. His first novel, The Black Flower , was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this sweeping, lyrical tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War, Bahr (The Black Flower) brilliantly depicts vanquished Southerners coming to terms with the ravages of war, while their Northern counterparts go about the grueling and often thankless task of making the country whole again. Shamed by his girlfriend, Morgan Rhea, and her father into signing up with the Confederate army, former Cumberland, Miss., English teacher Gawain Harper is on his way back to the civilian life he abruptly left three years before. Taking up with another returning soldier, Harry Stribling, an enigmatic fellow Southerner who fancies himself a philosopher, 40-year-old Gawain confronts the dispiriting realities of change. The countryside is different, but so are the people, and the horrors of war have altered Gawain as well. Bahr ingeniously explores the many facets of killing: hand-to-hand combat; killing for vengeance; killing for hire; killing in self-defense or out of loyalty to a cause. Most troubling of all is the kind of killing fueled by a perverse righteousness and a lust for power--the kind practiced by renegade Southern leader Solomon Gault, a wealthy smuggler and a force to be reckoned with in Cumberland. Among his other evil deeds, Gault killed Morgan's sister Lily during the war, and so Gawain is drawn against his will into yet another battle, this time on his home turf. It is Gault's final skirmish that brings Southerners and Northerners together, culminating in a confrontation that will haunt Gawain and his loved ones forever. Bahr has crafted an unforgettably powerful and original Civil War story in this incisive account of one man's search for redemption from the sins of fratricidal conflict. 13-city author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A brilliantly woven Civil War story about the ``jubilant'' year (1865) following the supposed cessation of hostilities, from the author of the highly praised (and rather similar) debut novel The Black Flower (1994). The latter unfortunately all but drowned in the wake of the spectacular success enjoyed by Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. This time around, Bahr ought to nab the hosannas and prizes, for he has produced a stunningly imagined and lyrically written chronicle of the return home (to war-ravaged Cumberland, Mississippi) of Gawain Harper, a former schoolteacher (and an Arthurian seeker) who had reluctantly enlisted as an infantryman in the Confederate Army, in order to earn permission to marry his sweetheart, widowed Morgan Rhea. Morgan's father, devout secessionist Judge Nathaniel Rhea, had demanded that all Southerners do their duty. Having done so, Gawain returns to find his own family decimated, the Rheas dispossessed and powerless, and to learn that the Judge has set him another task: to kill ``King Solomon'' Gault, a rabid white supremacist (``the gentleman farms without niggers'') and self-anointed leader of the vigilante 'rangers' who had murdered Morgan's sister and her husband, a Union sympathizer. But this is only prelude to a thrillingly articulated tragic romance that tells several convoluted stories, artfully juxtaposed, and creates a remarkably vivid cast, including Gawain's fellow survivor, Harry Stribling, self-proclaimed ``philosopher'' and ironical observer of the South's stubborn vision of its own ``chivalry''; imperious, passionate Morgan and Gawain's flinty Aunt Vassar'two of the strongest female characters in the whole range of historical fiction; Union Army officer Michael Burduck, haunted and driven by his memories of slavery's horrors; hideously deformed, obsessed slave- catcher Molochi Fish; and the aforementioned Gault, an avenging demon whose thirst for slaughter precipitates a harrowing climax. The shadow of Faulkner looms over an intricate webwork of festering secrets, conflicting passions, and ancestral guilt. No matter. The Year of Jubilo is a triumphant giant step forward for Bahr. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
Bahr, author of the acclaimed Civil War novel The Black Flower (1997), weaves a tapestry of love, loss, and redemption set in the immediate postwar era. As reluctant Confederate soldier and ex-schoolteacher Gawain Harper makes his weary way back to Cumberland, Mississippi, in the spring of 1865, he realizes he must face his own inner demons before he can hope to rebuild his life and secure the love and respect of Morgan Rhea, the prewar sweetheart whose father was responsible for shaming him into enlisting in the army. When Gawain arrives home, he finds that defeat and bitter circumstances have forever altered the fabric of the entire community and his own once-solid position within it. Plagued by questions of honor, revenge, and responsibility, he is compelled by Morgan, Judge Rhea, and his own conscience to seek vigilante justice against a citizen responsible for committing an unspeakably cruel wartime crime. Surrealistic, almost dreamlike, sequences serve to underscore the madness inherent in a world spinning out of control and the ambivalence of a man desperately seeking a moral compass in the midst of anarchy and despair. Bolstered by the revival of interest in the Civil War novel generated by the popularity of Cold Mountain (1997), this stunning narrative should find an eager, tailor-made audience. --Margaret Flanagan
Library Journal Review
While there may never be another Cold Mountain, Bahr's novel is as close as we're likely to get under current copyright law. It has many of the appealing elements of the earlier book: the Confederate soldier returning home in defeat, the wild adventures, the strong women, and the colorful secondary characters. Pressured into enlisting by the father of his sweetheart, Morgan Rhea, Gawain Harper limps home years later to find his Mississippi hometown occupied by union soldiers yet ravaged by the vigilante violence of "King Solomon" Gault. Harper seeks justice, aided by Harry Stribling, who has an uncanny knack for doing the right thing, and even Old Hundred and Eleven, named for the pattern of tobacco juice stains on his chin. Bahr, who was the curator at William Faulkner's home and museum for many years, also owes a clear debt to Faulkner, both in his prose style and preoccupation with abstract concepts. Narrated by Tom Stechschulte, this Civil War tale is highly recommended. John Hiett, Iowa City P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
