SECOND READING: The Violent Bear It Away, By Flannery O'ConnorAN ORPHAN boy is raised by his ancient great-uncle, a man of powerful, one might say, extreme religious convictions. Something of a self-styled prophet, the demented old whisky distiller had groomed the boy as his successor in preaching God's message through baptism, writes Eileen Battersby.
Crisis reigns in the magnificently rhythmic opening sentence: "Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the signs of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up", and it never settles.
Well, the deceased was his great-uncle, and his uncle, a schoolteacher and brother of the orphan's dead and disgraced young mother, has never stopped trying to grab the boy back from the old man. Welcome to Powderhead, Tennessee; better still, welcome to the black-as-night comic, but always humane, satire of Flannery O'Connor's unforgettable second novel, published in 1960.
Long after having initially lost the boy to the old man, Rayber the schoolmaster, now the father of Bishop, a mentally challenged little boy, wants young Tarwater more than ever. O'Connor's staunch Catholicism did not prevent her from exploring the zany extremes of righteous religious fervour as battled out in the Deep South. The clashes between the old man and the schoolmaster are vividly recalled. It had been a fight to the death and the old man's passing is a subject that dominates the narrative: "The morning the old man died, he came down and cooked the breakfast as usual and died before he got the first spoonful to his mouth." Before you begin feeling too sorry for the again abandoned boy, do note that he knew the old man was dead: "and he continued to sit across the table from the corpse, finishing his breakfast in a kind of sullen embarrassment as if he were in the presence of a new personality and couldn't think of anything to say." Even if the bizarre story was nowhere as good as it undoubtedly is, the writing alone holds the reader. O'Connor, who was from Savannah, Georgia, spent her short life under the shadow of an inherited disease. She looked at the world through open eyes with a diviner's feel for humour. The narrative abounds with inspired set pieces, such as a visit to the old man's lawyer, while several comic sequences draw upon the battle of wills between the narrow-minded, exasperated school master and his wary nephew.
But before arriving at his uncle's house, young Tarwater, unable to dig the grave, decides instead to burn the house down, thus disposing of the body. Convinced he has cremated the old man, he flees. Hours later he hitches a ride with a tired travelling salesman who asks the boy to keep him awake. Meeks, the copper flu salesman, reckons Tarwater is a runaway and lectures him about life. On arrival at the schoolmaster's house, Tarwater wages a war of angry silence, The schoolteacher brings his son Bishop and the newcomer, to a beach resort. A dramatic power struggle develops into which O'Connor injects complex religious symbolism and a fatal Baptism. This is strange, singular Southern Gothic allowing horror and comedy to run full circle.
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This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon