Intruder in the Dust [Hardcover]

... the "owner" of which was a man who said "mister" to whites, but did not really mean it. The meal was served to 12 year old Charles Mallison, after he had fallen in an icy pond, and the server, who didn't mean mister, was Lucas Beauchamp. Four years later the "bill" for those collard greens would come due, and it would be Mallison's actions that would save Beauchamp's life. "Intruder in the Dust" is one of Faulkner's later works, written just after World War II. The perennial themes of his works are exhibited: his examination of life in barely fictional Yoknapatawpha County, whose county seat is Jefferson, (Oxford, MS) and the continued fall-out from America's "original sin," slavery. From Faulkner's majestically southern mansion of Rowan Oaks, he wrote in fear of the "white trash" that surrounded him, so often identified as the Snopes family, but in this novel they are transformed into the Gowries, from "Beat Four." Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness style always challenges the reader to stay engaged, or a vital clue to the story will be missed. And like those slower internet connections, he "backs and fills" his pixels, slowly revealing the entire story. This is also an excellent "mystery" novel; the particular situations involving the grave seem "impossible," but Faulkner makes it all so understandable, masterfully so, in the fullness of time. Faulkner is certainly not for the "fun read" crowd, nor, apparently, based on the reviews posted here, for sophomores in "Advanced Placement" English. I shutter at the thought of how many students have become confirmed non-readers of serious books for the rest of their lives as a result of such classes.

I am an immense fan of Faulkner, and still hope to read or re-read all his works. This time it was a re-read, after 35 or so years, and fortunately, even the first time was not a dreaded school assignment. There remain the wonderful, original descriptive passages that contain nuggets like: "...and forlorn across the long peaceful creep of late afternoon, into the mauve windless dome of dusk..." and "...if there were only some way to efface the clumsy room-devouring carcasses which can be done but the memory which cannot." But on the re-read I noticed Faulkner's "feet of clay." In referring to a patched roof, how much meaning is conveyed by "insolent promptitude," or a lathe's "ineluctable shaft," or "incredulous disbelief"?

But the real "feet of clay" are political, and there is a three page defense of the South's "go slow" policy for granting Blacks equal rights. The passage doesn't work in a literary sense, in that it plops, "cut and pasted," interrupting the dramatic tension of an enthralling mystery. Consider: "...only we (meaning white Southerners) must do it, and we alone without help or interference or even (thank you) advice since only we can if Lucas's equality is to be anything more than its own prisoner inside an impregnable barricade of the direct heirs of the victory of 1861-1865..." James Baldwin, in Nobody Knows My Name in his chapter entitled "Faulkner and Desegregation," offers the seminal critique of such an attitude: "After more than two hundred years in slavery and ninety years of quasi-freedom, it is hard to think very highly of William Faulkner's advice to `go slow.' `They don't mean go slow,' Thurgood Marshall is reported to have said, `they mean don't go.'"

Upon the re-read I was also struck by how derivative Harper Lee's classic book, To Kill A Mockingbird: 50th Anniversary edition is, down to the two different men, both sitting in the doorway of the jailhouse, to prevent a lynching, as well as even the mockingbird! It is a point another reviewer made, but I had never realized it before, nor seen it in a critique of Lee's work.

Faulkner may be most associated with black-white relations, but he also has something to say about male-female relations. Consider: "...just enough dirt to hide the body temporarily from sight with something of that frantic desperation of the wife flinging her peignoir over the lover's forgotten glove..." or "I am fifty-plus years old,' his uncle said. `I spent the middle fifteen of them fumbling beneath skirts. My experience was that few of them were interested in love or sex either. They wanted to be married.'"

It pains me to knock a star from a Nobel-prize winning "idol," but the "feet of clay" are most certainly there.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on November 22, 2009)

This novel is, in form, a thriller with a classic thriller plot- the fight to prove the innocence of a man accused of a crime he did not commit. (Alfred Hitchcock used this plot in a number of his films, and "Intruder in the Dust" was itself made into a very good film by Clarence Brown in 1949, only a year after its publication). Faulkner takes this basic plot and uses it to explore the problem of racism in America's Deep South; Harper Lee was later to take a similar plot, and use it for a similar purpose, in "To Kill a Mockingbird".

The book is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its capital, Jefferson, based upon the real Lafayette County and Faulkner's own home town of Oxford. The innocent man wrongly accused is Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly, widowed black farmer. Although Beauchamp is honest and respectable, he is resented by many whites because he refuses to "behave like a nigger", that is to say behave in a servile manner. When a white man named Vinson Gowrie is shot dead, Beauchamp is accused of the crime. Gowrie was from Beat Four, a wild, hilly district of the county, whose white inhabitants are noted for their lawless ways and their ingrained prejudices against blacks. A mob, mostly members of Gowrie's extended family, gathers in Jefferson, threatening to break into the jail and lynch Beauchamp.

The story is told through the eyes of Charles Mallison, the sixteen-year-old nephew of Gavin Stevens, the relatively liberal white lawyer who acts for Beauchamp. Charles, who regards himself as being in Beauchamp's debt ever since, four years earlier, the old man rescued him after he fell in a stream, sets out to prove that Beauchamp did not fire the fatal shot. Together with his black friend Aleck and Miss Habersham, an elderly spinster (did Faulkner derive her name from Dickens' Miss Havisham?) he makes the dangerous body to Beat Four to exhume the body of the murdered man- and makes a surprising discovery.

Racial issues play an important part in Faulkner's work; indeed, it would probably be difficult for any Southern writer to avoid them altogether. His own views on the topic, however, seem to have been rather mixed. On the one hand he was an anti-racist, regarding the intolerant prejudice of many white Southerners as an affront to both decency and rationality. On the other hand, he was himself a proud Southerner, conscious of his family's Confederate heritage; his great-grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (thus spelt), had been a Confederate hero in the Civil War. In this novel Faulkner himself seems to adopt what might be called a neo-Confederate position, believing that, if the South could not be an independent, sovereign state it should at least form a culturally autonomous unit within the USA and have the right to deal with its own problems without interference from the North. He devotes several pages of the novel to his thesis that attempts by outsiders to combat racism in the south had actually been counter-productive and that black Southerners would never achieve equality until white Southerners were allowed to address the issue on their own terms.

The novel was written in the late forties, before the rise of the Civil Rights movement, and I think that Faulkner was wrong about race. The large-scale exodus of rural Southern blacks to Northern industrial cities in the first half of the twentieth century meant that race relations could no longer (if indeed they ever could) be thought of as solely a Southern issue. Since 1948 race relations in America have seen an immense change for the better; as I write this in October 2008 it seems quite likely that next month Barack Obama will not only be elected America's first black President but will also carry several Southern states. This change would not have been possible without the Civil Rights movement and the active involvement of Northerners, both black and white, and of the institutions of the Federal government.

Despite my disagreements with him, I nevertheless found Faulkner's analysis of the South's racial problems a stimulating and thought-provoking one. The characters are, for the most part, memorable and powerfully drawn. I did not, however, altogether enjoy this book, largely because of the eccentricities of the prose style that the author adopts here, a prose style characterised by long, rambling (and often syntactically disorganised) sentences, sometimes extending over several pages. He also has a weakness for obscure vocabulary items.

Faulkner was, presumably, aiming at the sort of stream-of-consciousness effect he had used to good effect in other, better, novels, such as "As I Lay Dying". This style can be a valuable tool for showing us the world through the eyes of a fictional character or, in the case of "As I Lay Dying" which uses first-person multiple-narrator technique, through the eyes of a string of different characters. When stream-of-consciousness is used to represent the writer's own authorial voice, it becomes much less effective. "Intruder in the Dust" is a third-person narrative, and, although Charles is the central character, we are not always certain if it is his voice we are hearing, or the author's. As a result of this confusion, and of his often impenetrable syntax, the author's train of thought is in places difficult to follow, which means that, despite its interesting themes, "Intruder in the Dust" is not as effective a book as it could have been.

William Faulkner seems to be one of those writers that you can either get on with or you can't. Unfortunately in my case I fall into the category of 'can't'. This is the second Faulkner book I have begun and abandoned halfway through, the other being The Sound and the Fury.

Intruder in the Dust was an excellent idea for a book; a black man living in the Southern US is wrongfully accused of murdering a local white man. A white boy, who owes the accused his life, sets out to prove his innocence. Sounds pretty exciting doesn't it? It isn't.

Another reviewer described this book as a 'thriller' I couldn't disagree more, thrillers are supposed to be exciting aren't they? I managed to reach page 140 before giving up and nothing much happened in those pages, at least that I could understand.

Faulkner has a unique style of writing which is truly his own. I thought Hemingway was challenging to read until I picked up this book. To begin with Faulkner had something against punctuation, this much is painfully obvious. Apparently he had a particularly seething hated for commas as is evident when you can read entire paragraphs and not see a single one. It must be a nightmare to read out loud. The book was difficult to read for other reasons too; the storyline is clouded, characters are not fleshed out, dialogue between characters is confusing and often pretty meaningless. The story itself plods along at a pace that I can only describe as agonisingly slow.

It is not all bad though, it is as plain as day that the South has a history worthy of shame for the way they treated black people and the ugliness of segregation and hatred is evident on practically every page which makes it an ugly, heavy book to read. Ugly and heavy isn't usually my cup of tea but if it had only been written in a manner that was a little easier to get through I'm sure I could have appreciated it.

I have come away with a newfound admiration for people who can read Faulker and love it. He is definately one of the most challenging writers you can come across.