Requiem by Fire: A Novel [Hardcover]

In his second novel, Requiem by Fire, Asheville native Wayne Caldwell continues to plough and sow and carve and create his own literary landscape, in the way that Faulkner did with his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, or Ellen Gilchrist did in her early stories of Uptown New Orleans, Pat Conroy with coastal South Carolina or, dast I say it, Thomas Wolfe with Altamont/Asheville.

In Caldwell's case, it is the Cataloochee Valley of Western North Carolina, in Haywood County. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Caldwell's novels are set, Cataloochee was a thriving small farming community. It was a lovely if isolated hemlock-, maple-and pine-rimmed valley, set among 6,000-foot peaks. Cataloochee today is the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park's answer to Cades Cove, only more remote and harder to get to.

In Requiem, Caldwell's mountaineers, at the time when the U.S. government was buying up property for the new national park, are wrestling with the decision of whether to take the money and move out of their Edenic valley, or, paradoxically, to stay and watch it return to its state of natural grace.

Fire starts and ends the book, the first fire a surprisingly practical way to improve the education of the children of the valley; the last fires to purge evil from the valley and perhaps to light the way to an old mountain man's ultimate reward. In between there is fire every page or two - a Home Comfort cook stove, a lesson on how to build a fire in a fireplace, a discussion about the virtues of different kinds of firewood.

Plotting is not Caldwell's forte. Requiem by Fire, like his Cataloochee before it, is essentially a collection of character sketches and vignettes, woven - or, rather, patched - together into a quilt we can call the Cataloochee design: cantankerous old Silas Wright, the disgustingly evil Willie McPeters (a character never better named); the tragically mated Jim and Nell Hawkins; and Aunt Mary, who jaws with the spirit of her dead husband, Hiram.

But that doesn't matter. What Caldwell does is much more important than plotting. He has captured the soul of the mountains and put it on paper forever.

Caldwell respects and reveres the language of the mountains. Every chapter is a thesaurus of mountain expressions. He's probably the only serious writer in America who knows that in the Southern Appalachians a dope used to be a Coca-Cola.

I once did a guidebook to the Smokies, but I only know Cataloochee in a superficial way. I went back there a few days ago, to see the old deserted farmhouses in the spring and the elk grazing the new grass in the low pastures. Like us, the elk seem to enjoy staying down where it's flat and where there's plenty of food to eat. I communed with an old bull elk that was hanging out, all by himself, in the yard of the Palmer House.

At Cataloochee I read some of the last chapters of Requiem. It moved me deeply. I'm putting this novel and Cataloochee on my shelf next to the wonderful of books of John Parris, whose writings on my mountains and my people are sadly out of print and ignored today. Let us hope that never happens to Requiem by Fire and Cataloochee.

Full disclosure: Wayne Caldwell and I went to the same high school, where we were both early Bob Dylan fans, and I have known him off and on since.

Having stood in Cataloochee as it exists today and walked through the buildings that were allowed to remain, I have a special fondness for this location, as do the characters in the novel. In fact, I am sure that Silas Wright would be laughing at me as well, as I come to camp and hike through what he considered to be his home town. While it is wonderful that the government chose to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it is equally sad that it destroyed communities and ways of life that had been ingrained for nearly a hundred years. This sadness is captured by Mr Caldwell in Requiem by Fire. In between he also captures the mountain lifestyle, the disentegation of a mis-matched marriage, the descent into a special (and perverse)kind of madness, the effect of the great depression on fairly typical Americans, and, in a very funny section, the beginnings of mountain gift and craft shops that live on in the Smoky Mountain Craft Community to this day. And, perhaps most poignantly, the last years and death of a man determined to live out his life in the place of his birth. His characters are rich and fully developed and I disagree with the previous reviewer about his plotting. He captured the end of an era very well. In fact, I expect to find old Jim Hawkins still policing the valley on my next visit. An excellent read.

This is another 5 star winner from this author. A sequel to "Cattaloochee", his first, and equally wonderful. You become so familiar with the characters , you could almost recognized them if they were to walk in your line of vision. His description of place and time period is excellent.

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