All Souls' Rising: A Novel of Haiti (1)

I read all three of the books in this trilogy. None is better than the others. They form a wondrous composite whole. This work is brilliant, stunning in it's complexity and it's presentation. The research must have been phenomenal. The characters are well drawn inside of the history that the events represent. I was amused by other writer's comments about too many words and too gruesome or violent. If you read and there are too many words, then what are you reading for? If you understand the course of human events in the recorded world then you should know that human beings are not shinking violets when it comes to killing creatively, or rape or a host of other truly horrid human activities. The glory of Bell's achievement here is that he makes it all so real. Not too real, just humanly real. You can feel the heat. You can taste the coffee with a stick of sugar cane stirred in it. You can feel the characters love and hate based on their natures which are influenced by their experiences in life. This is not a read, it's a journey and one well worth taking. Masterful...

I have read all three novels in the triology. The set is breathtaking in scope and in demonstrating the control that Mr. Bell is able to bring to such a sprawling project. In retrospect, I cannot imagine how he had the courage to undertake something of this range and ambition; perhaps once you get in too deep you just have to keep digging. Mr. Bell fortunately has the tools: historical context, racial intermixing and tensions, international intrigue, dynamic characters, characters who serve as surrogates for the reader, exotic setting, religion, and blood and guts -- all based on fact and history. This is literary history, but grounded in fact not just the imagination, which makes the narrative all the more unbelievable and compelling. Because it is such a large commitment to read the whole set, I've only been able to convince a handful of people to bite off reading this fabulous work, but they too share my extraordinary degree of enthusiasm and sheer gratefulness for the books and Bell's effort to compose them. As one moves from book to book one sees greater development in Bell's power and sophistication as a novelist, including regarding his use of more vivid language and more elegant sentences. Judging the three novels together can only lead one to conclude that they are a work of great art and power. No doubt because the complextity of the story one must give a bit of time to ease into the work, more than the usual 100 pages or so. Also, I would recommend reading the triology over reasonable together in time, rather than say one-a-year due to the fact that you will lose some of the minor threads that come back into the narrative, say, 400 or 700 or 900 pages later in the books. Though there are several strong women characters -- and one who undergoes perhaps the greatest transformation (or maybe one would say two out the major-transforming three characters are women), the militarism and gore could be turnoffs to some, especially in the final book. I believe that any ordinary negative reaction to such things surely will be overwhelmed by the overall power of the work, and the fact that depicting the wars is not the object but that depicting the people is, both the ultimately revolutionary leader, Toussaint L'Overture and the other characters, and the moral context in which they are forced to act. This is a book that merits some serious concentration but that pays serious dividends. I'll certainly remember these far more than other works I've read. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to learn about the subject and to read such an example of what novels can be. My thanks to Madison Smartt Bell for writing this.

This is the kind of book that can make you seem obsessed. Once you enter Bell's world, you're disturbed, excited, and depressed, but you can't stop talking about the book you're in. It's like having a secret that's too heavy to really divulge, but you keep alluding to parts of it, as if you were talking in code. People look at you like you're sort of cracked, but generally they think it will pass. The blood-soaked history of Haiti is cause for despair, but the revolutionary spirit of the 1790's makes you hope in spite of what you know. Toussaint is one of the great heroes of all time, and Bell makes him both human and epic. In this book, you don't develop much emotional connection to him -- that's the province of more fictional characters like Doctor Hebert and Riau -- but you care immensely about his success as a leader. You want him to be as great, as visionary, as Martin Luther King, but he belongs to a different era, a violent one. The backdrop of the French Revolution, with its mixture of rights and terror, is essential to the drama of All Souls' Rising, and most readers will need to read the appendix several times to stay abreast of royalists, Jacobins, and emissaries from the Mother Country. Some knowledge of American history might help --Jefferson, for instance, opposed the Haitian slave revolt because he feared something similar in the US which would deprive him of slaves plus the boost he got from the 3/5 compromise which gave white planters more votes, while Adams and Pickering favored emancipation and liberation -- but you can follow the essential plot without historical annotation. It's the kind of gravy that lifts the book to a higher level, but readers looking for love, betrayal, courage, devotion, cruelty, sex, and perverse logic will be sated. Contemporary maps won't help with many of the locations, but Bell has a map in the second volume of the trilogy, Master of the Crossroads, that helped me get a sense of place. The themes and the style of the book are managed with power and grace. Bell's a hell of a writer, and I believed each of the voices in the narrative. Big books like this sweep you up and carry you away, but this book sweeps the reader into a present time of continuous revolution in Haiti, slaughter in Sudan, disease and unending horror in much of Africa, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. The blood drama of Bell's Haiti gives us a red filter for understanding our own time. At the end of the book, I'm thrilled by the revolutionary possibilities, depressed by the inevitable destruction and failure, and grateful for every moment of compassion and kindness however small. I can't wait to read the next volume.

I found this an extremely difficult read: I was 16, knew nothing about Haiti's history, and spoke no French. I took nearly three months to finish reading the book, because every so often I had to take a break from the horrific violence Bell portrays. In the end, however, this novel remains one of the most impressive I have ever read, in terms of the way it really made me think. The depths of terror and violence to which Bell's characters resorted shocked me. But I did not lose sight of the novel's bigger picture. Ultimately, I have little sympathy for the book's reviewers who could not see past the novel's violence and complexity. Five tries to get through the book? Try a Dick and Jane reader, then, and come back in a few years.

Most extraordinary, perhaps unique, is the way this book gets way inside the minds of 18th-century slaves faithful to Vaudou. It is something we cannot judge, yet Bell does it so convincingly you have to believe he actually got a look inside.