A Bloody Civil War: Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

"War", Bertrand Russell said, "does not determine who is right - only who is left." and if war is violent, incoherent and hell a civil war is even more violent, more incoherent and more hellish.  Many of James Lee Burke's previous novels have dealt tangentially with the scars left by the American Civil War on Louisiana, his home state, to my knowledge, this is the first novel in which he addresses this issue front on. 

We find ourselves at the tail end of this bloody brutal conflict, there are a whole range of characters as our narrators: the spoiled son of a plantation owner and something of a pacifist scarred by a chance encounter with the enemy, a man employed to resolve conflicts involving slaves, an enslaved black woman desperate to find her child, lost during a skirmish, and a deranged, diseased Confederate Officer. If Louisiana is a jigsaw, at this point in time all the pieces have been tossed into the air and left to land where they will, so the characters find themselves desperately scrabbling between them, attempting to make sense of their new situation and lives. The Union has now occupied most of the state but is still allowing slave trading to continue, some renegade confederate units still hold out, but their savagery causes as much fear among those supposedly on their own side as in the enemy. In this context a slave unjustly accused of the murder of her brutal owner attempts to escape the help of a brave female idealist, the constable has a disastrous duel with the plantation owner's son and careless words cost innocent lives.

This novel is as visceral and as garish as the uncertain times it set out to portray so well, it is not for the fainthearted, sometimes I did feel it was a bit much, and the characters larger-than-life, a little too strident, detracting from credibility, but there's no denying that James Lee has verve and he takes us on one hell of a ride, and it will keep you riveted until the end. As to what that end is... I would refer you to the quote at the beginning of this blog.