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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as effective as it could have been, 10 Oct 2008
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.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Faulkner had it wrong but with perfect accuracy, 16 Feb 2007
We are in the South, in a rural city and area. A crime is committed, a white man is shot dead and an old black man is arrested for it on Saturday night, red-handed, because he was next to the dead shot body with a gun in his pocket. This black man has had a past of refusing samboism. He always behaved in a non standard way for a black man in the South. No question is asked. A lawyer is called by the black man and the lawyer does not ask questions and assumes the black man is guilty of the crime he is accused of committing. It will take a white teenager (16 and the lawyer's nephew), a black teenager (his friend) and a white older lady with a truck to accept to go and explore the grave of the dead man on the request of the black man. They find out the man in the grave is not the man it should be, but is another assassinated white man. And then the plot thickens tremendously because these three people plus the lawyer will manage to take over and convince the sheriff to go investigate this tomb with them. The father and two sons of the victim have been summoned by the sheriff. The two sons will dig out the grave and find it empty. Then they all manage to find the body the teenagers and the woman had found more or less carelessly hidden in some sand and the body of the first assassinated person in a patch of quicksand. The black man is definitely saved. The criminal will be found out to be a fourth son of the old man, a brother of the victim himself because the murdering brother was cheating some wood out of a forest patch that was being cut down and sawn into boards to be sold later on, at a profit of course, from the assassinated brother with an accomplice, the second man who was killed two days later and hidden in the assassinated brother's tomb. This murdering brother will be forced to commit suicide in jail for the white community not to have a trial, not to have to hang a white man for the killing of two white men while at first a black man had been accused and had by pure chance escaped a lynching. But the book is interesting for a lot more than this murder plot. It is no thriller because we nearly know from the very start that the lynching will not happen. The interest of the book is in the narrator who looks at the situation and events through the sole eyes of the lawyer's nephew that is always referred to as "he", third person singular, and never with a name. This awkward narration creates a distanciation in the fictional voyeurism of the book that kind of keeps us active and alert. The second interest is in the long speeches and explanations the lawyer delivers to his nephew in order to initiate him to adulthood. The discourse is a general speculation about racism, samboism, the liberation of black people or rather of the South from this samboism and racism, how it can only happen from inside and not from outside, the reaction of the whites in front of this accused black and the possibility or impossibility of a lynching, etc. It is a close examination of the racial conscience of the South, and not only the whites, but also the blacks. The third interest is in the initiation of this young teenager that goes far beyond only understanding the southern mind, the southern past and future, the southern race relations and how to free them from the heritage of slavery and the end of it imposed from outside. It has to do with physical growing and even the sexual or emotional levels of that growing, how some sexual emotion can appear in the strangest of all situations and distort the teenager's vision for a while. Finally it also depicts the complexity and beauty, contradictory confusion and clarity of their mentality and consciousness, or unconsciousness. Faulkner has it all wrong as for how the liberation of the blacks will come, but it does not matter : it represents the vision the whites had at a certain moment in history, in fact between the two world wars. He could not take into account the consequences of WW2 on the mental liberation of the black community and particularly the weight and power northern blacks will find in the war that will make them go down South, if necessary and with white people too eventually, to help their black brothers down South to get on the road to civil liberties. But it is this very historical limitation that makes the novel all the more interesting.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
too much of a good thing, 19 Jun 2009
Faulkner is a great writer, and a unique one to describe the inner flow of thought and conscience. But as other reviewers have pointed out, that technique or literary resource is wasted here. The plot is a bit of a thriller and a bit of a crime novel, and that what makes this a cranky novel: the inner flow is not very good for this theme. This could have been a good picture script, and indeed has good moments and findings, but all in all, you get intagled with the writer / the main character / the uncle... and lose track with the plot.
Faulkner probably planned this novel to express his view on slavery and Southerner society, and indeed some of his points of view are outdated and even insulting (although well intended), but this is a minor problem here.
Not a bad read, but Faulkner has much greater novels. Well, at least this has a happy ending, and doesn't blow in your face.
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by William Faulkner
by William Faulkner
by William Faulkner
by William Faulkner
by Richard Wright
