Fire in the Rock

It is a rare quality of a debut novel to successfully incorporate enlightenment, inspiration and historical reflection. Joe Martin's "Fire in the Rock," a sensitive and provocative examination of race, friendship and the influence of the past, is a stunning work. Not only does "Rock" compel us to participate in a thoughtful dialogue about race, the novel engages our heart through its brilliant characterizations. Martin introduces us to people we come to care about deeply. Through a stirring, subtle narrative, which spans the decade of the onset and flowering of the civil rights movement, change is constant, but the evolution of the characters is anything but fluid, as they are weighed down not only by race, but by the burdens of a racially-charged past.The author requires patience from his readers. Characters' names evolve; their identities, deftly nuanced, intensify and deepen as they come to grips with the tension engendered by struggle against racism and past restrictions. Bigotry and violence, implicit throughout the novel, affect friendships, force personal confrontations and elicit either great courage or craven cowardice. Change, often unpredictable, sudden and explosive, never occurs easily, and each character must battle not only nerves, but the weight of a veiled past."Rock" treats the complex, deep freindship between two young men: Bo Fisher and Paul (Apollo) Templeton. Idealistic and sensitive, Bo yearns to learn of the world, struggling against his status as the sheltered son of the town's liberal Presbyterian minister and his wryly assertive mother. This earnest, naive white teen matures through and with his relationship with Paul, whose racial consciousness transforms him from figurative blindness to profound sight, from a shadowed existence to a piercing leadership in the civil rights movement, from insularity to engagement. Through dialogue, books and play, Bo and Paul forge a friendship which challenges racial convention. Martin's delightful incorporation of the Tarzan myth, and how it reflects and refracts Bo and Paul's perceptions, serves as a metaphor not only of the two men, but of the nation in which they are coming of age. Ultimately, both men are informed and influenced by W.E.B. DuBois instead of racial fiction."Rock" contains provocative commentary on Southern identity. Bo, on a trip to Philadelphia, discovers himself to the the outcast, the social pariah. He muses about spoken and written English, ponders why Southerners are the ones said to have an accent instead of New Yorkers and Chicagoans. Why don't publishers "render Southern accents with correct standard spelling and put the various Northern accents in dialect"? In addition, the novel investigates the desire for and understanding of attraction, a drawing together of not only men and women, but Blacks and whites. "Rock," through the example of an elderly African-American storekeeper, brilliantly probes the impact of past horrific violence and th

I love to read about the south, this book took my there and even farther. I liked Pollo and Bo, wanted more of Mae Maude and the baby she gave up. I would like to read more of this author.

I just finished reading Fire in the Rock, and wanted to comment about how moved I was by this story. It came to my attention only because its publisher is Novello Festival Press, a division of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Public Libraries here in Charlotte, NC, where I work as a part time library aide. The author is Joe Martin, a resident of Charlotte. This is his first novel, and he previously co-authored a book called On Any Given Day, which chronicles his life dealing with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). Mr. Martin is a very expressive writer, and the descriptions of people and events are full of vivid detail. You may notice that I gave the book a four star rating rather than five. I wonder if my feeling might be more a reflection of my unfamiliarity with the settings and circumstances depicted, rather than a weakness on the part of the author. I wish I could give it 4 ½ stars.This is a story told by Bo, a white Presbyterian minister's teenaged son, about himself and his two friends, Pollo, a black boy, and Mae Maude, a white girl. Race plays an important role in this story, as the three friends spend an idyllic summer together in 1956 in rural South Carolina. But the summer ends with a catastrophic event that changes the lives of two of the friends forever. Suddenly the story shifts to 1966, when Bo is a graduate student at Duke University, and Pollo has become a minister. The two meet again in the middle of events that will affect the status quo between the races in their small town.As a "Yankee" living here in the South now, I don't feel qualified to comment on how realistically this book portrays the relationships between southern blacks and whites in that period. I was particularly struck by Bo's acceptance of the customary roles of blacks and whites while at the same time he didn't seem completely comfortable, either. He is ashamed when he has to admit false judgments he grew up accepting, and becomes confused or angry when he faces untrue assumptions that others make about him. My favorite scene in the book is when, as adults, Bo and Pollo attend a formal dinner party together in a northern city. The hosts and other guests rudely misjudge Bo, making him feel ignored and devalued as a human being. For the first time in his life, Bo was in a situation where he suffered the treatment Pollo obviously had endured his entire life. I'm not sure Bo saw the irony, but Pollo clearly did and it seems that certainly the author intended the reader to notice it, too.This book was worth my time, both as an enjoyable visit to an unfamiliar place and time, and as an opportunity to read something that challenged my perspective.