The US novelist Kevin Powers is preoccupied with the before and after of violence. The Yellow Birds, his prize-winning debut from 2012, follows a GI back home from Iraq, his mind still snarled in the horror of that maelstrom. With its teeming cast and a plot coiling back and forth over a century and a half, A Shout in the Ruins provides a more expansive overview of conflict – this time the American civil war – and its devastating effect on bodies, minds, families and societies.
The forms of violence in Powers’s second novel are legion. At a “doomed” Virginia hotel in 1863, a plantation owner and his new bride, Emily, stiffly eat dinner while pretending not to hear bread riots erupting in the streets outside. Yet Emily has more pressing problems than a spoiled wedding night: her cold-blooded husband, Levallois, is bent on yoking her family estate into his “kingdom” at the Beauvais plantation. The war has also unloosened a rampant sadism within the civilian populace. Scenes of mutilations and assaults (one depicts scavengers picking the pockets of a wounded soldier before caving his face in) are laced with lyricism, while Emily’s letters capture an eerie sense of apocalypse: “Father, I fear the world is falling apart.”
A Shout in the Ruins might have resembled a blood-spattered melodrama were it not for the interwoven 20th-century strand. Here, armed with The Negro Traveler’s Green Book, we see nonagenarian George Seldom trudging across a segregated south, intent on finding out about his “people” before he dies. Aided by Lottie, a kind waitress, he finds the dilapidated rural cabin where he was raised. A lifetime after he was pulled from beneath his dead mother’s bloody skirts, memories return, granting Seldom a final-hour victory against the violence that war inflicted upon his family long after ceasefire.
Eager to steer his myriad storylines towards convergence, Powers collars unlikely characters to become the mouthpiece for his thematic bombast: “George thought … that violence is an original form of intimacy, and always has been, and will remain so forever”. But perhaps it is the unruly tangle of the plot itself that conveys most persuasively how the American psyche has been disarrayed by conflict.
If the savagery of the civil war seems a bleak, endless cycle, the story eventually leaps forward to discover when something akin to healing might take place. Powers’s decision to meander onwards with Lottie into middle age appears puzzling at first. But her day spent with Seldom evidently nurtured a compassion that she later brings to a boyfriend whose memories of Vietnam include “a child burned so badly that its skin came off in black coils, like a snake’s”.
Guided by a homing instinct for human truths, A Shout in the Ruins is a daring voyage into and out of the darkest era in American history.
• A Shout in the Ruins by Kevin Powers is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
