Spectator, The: Dark satanic mill

Dark satanic mill John de Falbe THE CLEARING by Tim Gautreaux Sceptre, L14.99, pp. 374, ISBN 0340828897

It is the early 1920s. Randolph Aldridge has come from Pennsylvania to inspect a sawmill in the swamps of Louisiana. When he finds that his older brother Byron is the works constable, he recommends to his father that they buy the place. Besides the commercial opportunities offered by the sawmill and the huge cypress forest around it, Randolph views the enterprise as a chance to bring his brother back into the family fold. Shell-shocked during the first world war, Byron has turned his back on his affluent, genteel background and now dispenses rough justice in the saloon. It is a brutal place. Gambling and whores are organised by vicious, corrupt Sicilians; violence is savage and frequent. Byron's favoured weapon is a shovel but he understands that shooting someone dead will probably prevent more injury than it causes.

The stage is set for a tough play-off between good and evil. By smashing up the Sicilians' headquarters in the nearby town and pulling it into the river with a boat, Byron persuades the Sicilians to close the bar on Sundays. The Sicilians retaliate with calculated terror: violence escalates. Randolph wants to moderate Byron's way of dealing with the crisis; to understand how he was brutalised by his wartime experiences and to rescue him from his bitter inner suffering. But in defeating the Sicilians Randolph must learn to respect Byron's way of doing things, just as Byron must recognise that the cycle be halted. Randolph's wife Lillian helps establish some good (school, church) in this incarnation of hell, while Ella tries to pull Byron back from his excesses. There is a little boy called Walter, the son of Randolph's housekeeper who was murdered by the Sicilians. Walter is a symbol of hope in the chaos, adored by both the brothers. The redemptive role of Walter and the women is the novel's clumsiest feature, but it is a minor quibble.

Even if this excellent novel were not set in the swamps of Louisiana and its author's nationality were not stated on the jacket, you could not mistake for an instant that it is American. Detractors might say that this is because of a childish moral structure, but this would be unfair. The moral world is clear, but Gautreaux gets away with it because it is fully imagined. The mill is remote, dirty, violent and atmospheric. When an alligator pulls a worker into a flood, or a tooth from a sabotaged saw is removed from someone's chest without anaesthetic, the reader squirms. The nastiness is unflinching. But the brothers too are portrayed with care. Randolph's natural fastidiousness and Byron's mental horrors are real enough, and there is a robust sense of them striving to rise to the demands of the situation. For what is also distinctively American is the novel's sense of its own gravity. The alertness to good and evil is constant and you feel - almost - that language itself is a moral tool. Because the main characters are supple and convincing, the moral clarity, in the end, is persuasive rather than sententious.