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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
The Year of Jubilo
The opening of Howard Bahr's The Year of Jubilo could have come straight from a Sergio Leone film. Actually, the opening does. Leone's 1968 classic, Once Upon a Time in the West, opens with an unsuspecting family of settlers being harassed by a cold-blooded hired killer (Henry Fonda, cast chillingly against type) and his gang. The viewer knows from the start it will not end well for the family. Granted, in Bahr's novel, the particulars may differ — this family is not quite unsuspecting, sweet-voiced Solomon Gault is avenging perceived treason, and, most tellingly, the entire event is "seen" through the eyes of the blind son of the doomed family — but the dramatic timbre is the same. This prologue is not the only familiar aspect of Bahr's book. Anyone who has read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain will be struck by the surface similarity of setup: a man returns home from the Civil War. Waiting for him, he hopes, is a woman to return to and an interrupted courtship to resume. But Gawain Harper, Jubilo's protagonist, is not meant to copy Frazier's Inman; nor is Morgan Rhea, the woman Harper returns to, meant to mimic Ada. Both are drawn in an understated manner that defies the reader to cast too allegorical or lyrical an interpretation on them. Harper is a teacher who has reluctantly joined the Rebels as the only means of proving himself in the eyes of Morgan's father (and of maintaining the regard of Morgan herself). Morgan is an intelligent, thirty-something widow with a face "pale, thin, pitted with smallpox scars, but still pretty" who has awaited, though not necessarily expected, Gawain's return. As if to balance the subtly drawn, almost dramatically quiescent Gawain and Morgan, Bahr has populated Jubilo with a host of sharply defined supporting characters. There is the ancient bearded albino Old-Hundred-and-Eleven, Molochi Fish (boiled alive as a child by his mother - ouch!), the somewhat mentally unhinged Colonel Burduck, and the vicious Wall Stutts. Such an extremely drawn supporting cast could seem strained and overly contrived, but in this case, the effect is the opposite: the characters are so idiosyncratic that they must be real. The end-of-war setting aids such a conclusion — everyone is damaged goods in some way, and the reader expects, or at least easily accepts, that damaged people abound. Perhaps the strangest, though not necessarily unappealing, aspect of The Year of Jubilo lies in its deliberate pacing. On the surface, the story has all the elements of a thriller — a soldier returns from war to a ravaged home to reunite with his love. Unbeknownst to them both, a villain sets his nefarious plan in motion, a plan that could threaten the couple's prospect for happiness. Can our hero foil this plan, saving himself, his love and perhaps the whole town?! (Cue dramatic music.) Yet, Jubilo is not really a page-turner. Its action — and there is plenty of action — seems muted and secondary next to all the, well, thinking the characters do. Bahr lets the reader into the minds of all his characters, and they spend a large amount of their time considering, remembering, and, in the case of self-avowed philosopher Harry Stribling, philosophizing. When a character just isn't the type for introspection — as with Molochi Fish — the narrator does it for him. This might be enough in itself to keep the pot from boiling, but Bahr lowers the temperature further in his structuring of the action. Almost as soon as a threat to one of the main characters materializes, the counter to that threat is revealed, leaving the reader with little apprehension for the character's safety (though a Columbo-like interest in how things will play out remains). This is not to imply the story is too slow; it just possesses a measured tempo that belies its trappings. The moves may belong to the merengue, but the dance is a waltz. And despite his status as the ostensible protagonist, Gawain Harper is not leading the dance. Together, Harry Stribling and Solomon Gault provide the energy and often the literal actions that move the story along. As a result, they hold the reader's attention in a manner Gawain and Morgan only occasionally maintain. Gault, as the Arch-Villain, does the most stirring up, of course, but Stribling, for all his professed status as a philosopher, is as much a benevolent gadfly, sticking his nose into everything and putting the pieces together almost as soon as he gets them. If every book has a character that is in some way a simulacrum for the author, Stribling would be Bahr's. What does all this say for The Year in Jubilo? Ultimately, for all the other stories and genres it evokes, Bahr's novel achieves a feel and hold on the reader's imagination resolutely its own. Jubilo does not evoke Once Upon a Time in the West and Cold Mountain because it is overly derivative but because Bahr's writing is, in itself, evocative. As a result, The Year in Jubilo rewards the effort spent reading it and will stay with the reader long after that latest Ludlum thriller has faded. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? Living in Nashville, TN, Michael Burgin edits for a monthly business magazine and annotates television scripts for syndication abroad. He likes writing bios in which he talks about himself in the third person.
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