Redemption Falls

Redemption Falls is the most recent novel by Joseph O'Connor. Mr. O'Connor also wrote The Salesman, which is fantastic, and The Star of the Sea, also a favourite, among other novels.

I'm not sure where to start discussing this book. It is set in Civil War and post-Civil War America, several years after the famine ship Star of the Sea landed in New York. It is a long book, and that is accentuated by the fact that it is written in layers of narratives and posters and testimonies, fictions, and scraps of journals, a collection of stuff that forms the story and develops the characters and themes through many digressions. As well, all is not what it may seem all the time. Many of the characters are complex and understandings of them the reader may develop through the book change along the way as more 'evidence' is presented. Points of view are divergent and passionate.

Characters include O'Keefe, a failed Civil War General and former escapee from an down-under prison colony, who is made Acting Governor of the Mountain Territory - as punishment for screwing up in the war, his millionaire wife, her possible lover, a young boy who has witnessed wartime hell, his sister who has walked from Louisiana to the Mountain Territories (must be Montana - the Missouri is referenced)to find him, and Confederate rebel Outlaw robber murderer Johnny Thunders.

I had a little trouble with this book through the first hundred or so pages because the layered development and the cadence of the novel takes a while to settle into. At a certain point though, as the relationships between disparate parts begin to be revealed, and the characters begin to live in your imagination, this novel takes off. Redemption Falls is a historical epic Irish-American novel and much more.

This book will stay with me for a long time.

On the 5 anchovy rating scale, I give this one a case of salties.