Book Review: A Separate Country by Robert Hicks

By Carlotta G. Holton

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Robert Hicks’ earlier novel, The Widow of the South, I opened the sequel A Separate Country with great expectations. Set in post-Civil War New Orleans, A Separate Country is a close look at the travesties of war as reflected in the individual, families, and the healing nation as a whole. Hicks’ second novel begins as a promising sequel to his first rich historical drama, following the life and perils of Confederate General John Bell Hood. I was disappointed with this continuing journey.

The novel is structured as a story within a story, and at the core is the atonement of Hood’s sins on the battlefield. The tale of redemption begins on Hood’s deathbed as he summons Eli Griffen, an old war adversary, and charges him with the mission of finding a former comrade, Sebastien Lemerle. Hood hopes this man will see it fit to forgive him and consent to having Hood’s memoirs published.

In flashbacks seen through the eyes of three narrators – Hood, his wife Anna Marie, and Griffen – the readers confront the general as a broken man, both physically and spiritually. He has an artificial leg, a bum arm, and no money, and is earnestly seeking reparation for his war-time mistakes. He and his wife, Anna Marie, who was a society Creole, live in diminished circumstances with their eleven children. His once passionate relationship with his wife becomes strained as he incurs business failures and debt.

This journey of guilt, regret, and salvation begins in Hood’s voice. I found his descriptions long and boring as he tries to redeem his tarnished military reputation, including a bloody battle against the Comanche at Devil’s River. While A Separate Country is peopled with colorful and memorable secondary characters, including Rintra, a dwarf; the burly Father Mike; and Griffen, I was left wanting more from the character of Hood. In particular, I was disturbed by his lack of demonstrative love toward his wife and children.

Though the main character is lacking, Hick’s tapestry of the South rings true. As his characters struggle through the pains of Reconstruction, he evokes the sense of bitterness and disillusion that pervaded the South. He notes, “Southern whites rejected all forms of equality, and blacks wanted nothing but full freedom and land of their own.”

It was a time of confusion and disorder peppered with the infusion of opportunistic carpetbaggers coming from the north, and the white Republican southerners, or scalawags, who sympathized with the Reconstruction effort. The ruined economic South provided a ripe climate for political upheaval. While Hood’s memoirs read dry and wordy, Anna Marie’s diaries are filled with the joys and struggles of her life which begins in the high society of a Southern belle and follows her descent into poverty and societal exclusion. While Hood struggles with good and evil, his wife wrestles with the issue of class. Prior to the Civil War, she was a white Creole-upper class woman who spoke French, attended lavish parties and had servants. She befriended a quadroon, Paschal, who was a piano teacher to her cousin. Though part black, he was light-skinned. After the war, when she encourages him to attend a ball, she places him in danger as he is confronted by a man whose wife Paschal has coveted. Shocked at the violent result, she still does nothing to stop the crime. One has to ask why she did not help him. Is she really a racist at heart?

Hood’s penance over his egregious acts of war and Anna Marie’s guilt about her failure to save Paschal trigger a new-found devotion in them to use their money and time to help poor blacks escape yellow fever. During the sweltering summer, the rich flee the city while the poor remain behind, weak and susceptible to the “yellow jack.” Aside from the verbosity of Hood’s story, there is an understated notion that Hood can only attain happiness by being dirt poor. Toward the end of her life, Anna muses, “I could be happy because I did not miss who I had been. I did not miss the balls and the dresses and the amusements, but most of all I did not miss the girl … She was a traitor to her class, to her people.”

Perhaps the truest character is Griffen, who travels to New Orleans with the intention of killing the man who murdered his family. He perceives Hood as a murderer: “Hood had fixed it so I would never quit seeing the dead and not just the frozen on that battlefield, piled atop each other, but also the face of my sister dead in her bed.” Yet he is unable to kill Hood. His narrative reads easily and is void of the guilt and egoism of Hood’s memoirs and Anna Marie’s sentimentality.

War affects every man. And while the Hood family’s quest for forgiveness remains questionable, Griffen achieves what they failed to do. He says, “what I lost was any expectation of good and right, any faith that I could know these things anymore.” Despite the horrors he has lived through, he defends both of the Hoods’ written words and seeks the truth.

With such rich material from which to draw, Hicks could have been braver and cut more of the story. In this case, less would have definitely been more. For readers of historical fiction I would refer them to his other great work, Widow of the South.

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead and Vampire Resurrection, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.