This historical account of the great slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790's, in one sense, made me think of the mostly disastrous American military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, it was a question of trying to control indigenous political and cultural turmoil with outside military solutions. Americans can only hope that their efforts in the 21st century will not turn out as badly as did Napoleon's sending of troops to Haiti in the l9th century.Bell's book is fiction, but I've read that his historic research is scrupulous and accurate. The slave insurrection in Haiti was the only "successful" slave revolt in history, something so unique that it could even be considered a defining moment in the history of Europe and the Americas. But the success came at a high cost and its consequences are still felt in Haiti two hundred years later. Haiti was France's most prosperous New World colony with abundant production, chiefly of sugar cane and coffee. But it had an combustible mix of people, made up of whites, mulattoes, and blacks, none of whom trusted the other. Creating more complexity was the French Revolution which raged through the l790's, with plantation owners in Haiti divided along royal and Jacobin lines, as well as racial ones. Added to this period of confusion was international strife in the Caribbean between France, England, and Spain, and to a lesser extent the United States. When the chaotic slave uprising first broke out , it was incredibly vicious, both sides giving way to savagery in punishing the other. Toussaint L'Ouverture was a freed slave, educated and disciplined, and he gradually organized a black army which battled the forces sent by Napoleon. Outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever helped decimate the French army, and it finally gave up on its mission to pacify the country. L'Ouverture, however, was captured by the French and taken to France where he languished and died in a French prison. The victory, though, was a hollow one as the war left the country in shambles with no infrastructure to recreate or sustain its formerly profitable economy. Most whites, for example, who weren't killed, fled the country, 10,000 of them, in fact, coming to Baltimore. Haiti has never recovered and is now the most impoverished and mismanaged country in the western hemisphere. What the book gains from being fiction is highlighting aspects of the struggle. Bell does very well at describing the landscape of Haiti, the orderly plantations surrounded by jungles and mountains where the rebel slaves went to hide out. His characters represent different factions in this variegated society. A principal one is a a doctor who comes from France seeking word of his sister. He becomes involved with a mulatto woman who bears him children. She has a darker-skinned brother, angry over her involvement with this white foreigner. Fictitious, yes, but it is rooted in common occurrences on the island. There are horrific descriptions of savagery and torture in all quarters of society. . L'Ouverture,, disciplined leader, yes, but he has followers who have to be constantly reined in. The society is a witch's brew of Christian and voodoo beliefs, the backdrop of men and women who are full of racial and social hatred. With his depiction of L'Ouverture, stranded and isolated in a French prison, Bell creates the irony of a leader who has set in motion forces that he no longer controls. Would it be better to read about this period as a straightforward history rather than as historical fiction (this book is the first of a trilogy, but it stands on its own pretty well, I thought, ) no matter how well-researched? Not having read a history of Haiti, I can't say, but Bell's effort is certainly one that makes you viscerally feel, not just intellectually comprehend , this historical upheaval. The communication of feeling and emotion feeling is the the mark of any good fiction,, historical or otherwise.
Anyone who reads my blog (plug), will know - from looking at the Goodreads 'Currently Reading' widget there, that it's taken a long time to struggle through this one. A very long time. A very, very long time. You get the picture.I fully accept it could be me that found this to be a long-winded way of saying very little. I don't know. It's either a polished turd, or a searing condemnation of…something or other. To be honest, I'm too bored to worry about worrying about what on earth he was trying to do with this one.It's about the only successful slave rebellion ever. Which took place in Haiti (the French colony of Saint-Dominge, as it was) in 1791 - 1804. This book, I think, is set at the start, in 1791. Basically, we follow the progress of a French Doctor, through the French, the Haitian side of the island, before during and after the Slaves' uprising. It's written, I think, in a style he feels is appropriate for the era (I'm guessing it's a man. You never know with a name like Madison). So a kind of Jane Austin-style, if she was writing about people being skinned alive. Well, I'm sorry, but some of the descriptions of what went on, are unnecessarily gruesome. Absolutely unnecessarily graphic and downright disturbingly horrible. I've yet to find out if these sorts of things actually went on and the descriptions are based on fact or not. And I'm not going to. But, they did absolutely nothing to advance the cause of the novel. It descended in parts, into the worst sort of gratuitous slasher, cheap horror-movie blood bath. Horror for horror's sake with an attempt to dress it up in the tattered trappings of a serious work. Yes, I can understand that the slaves were highly likely to exact their revenge on their ex-masters and you could hardly blame them for doing what they did. But stretching it out, time and time again, page after page is just badly done. And then, if this stuff isn't based on actual incidents, on hard documented fact, and he's making all this up - then you're one very sick man, Mr Bell. Or Ms Bell.I came very, very close to knocking it on the head. Many, many times.I know it's always easier to be negative that positive, but I really am struggling to find anything positive to say about this one. Oh yeah, I got it free. Phew!That's it. If you're in the market for this sort of thing, you're probably going to appreciate it a lot more than I did. To be honest, I found the historical time-line at the back more interesting and readable than what preceded it. Probably, the Wikipedia page on the up-rising would read better.
What do You think about All Souls' Rising (2004)?
I do not think I’ve ever read a book I dislike more than All Soul’s Rising by Madison Smart Bell. The novel’s description states that “All Soul’s Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution,” but that’s not quite correct. Beginning with a crucifixion and ending in flames, Bell’s work is certainly filled with pain and terror, but the promised sense of triumph never arrives. Bell is so gratuitous in his depictions of rape, violation, and mutilation that nothing else he includes in the narrative makes it worth reading. I especially resent the fact that Bell tries to force the reader to identify—or sympathize—with a rapist (Riau). Furthermore, I dislike Bell’s narrative because the explicit nature of the violence depicted is unnecessary. I suppose one could try to argue for historicity, but the animation of a corpse at the book’s end proves that it is truly a fiction. In addition to the unrelenting brutality of All Soul’s Rising, I also did not like the novel’s narrative structure. Much like Dr. Hébert wanders through the Haitian landscape, often without direction or sense of place, so too the narrative wanders through the consciousnesses of various characters, dragging the Reader willy-nilly through the story. In conclusion, I did not like All Soul’s Rising, and I would not recommend it even to my greatest enemy.
—Elizabeth
"ASR" has everything - pure substance and hard content written with rhythm and grace. M.S. Bell has taken the historical novel to an ultimate point of evolution and created an original masterwork. The nightmarish events are never hidden, but seem to be filtered through a buffer zone of detached observation. The language is also highly hypnotic, and the result is like watching horrific imagery in a dazed state. For all this restraint, the novel is never sterile - a living pulse runs through it and permeates every page with vibrant presence. I was totally immersed while reading this; breathing and sensing the island, the epoch, the fictional and historical characters.Needless to say, I'll be reading the two other volumes in this trilogy, and soon.Overwhelming, potent, magnificent - one of the best books I've read in ages!
—Andrea
One of the best historical novels I’ve ever read. It’s about the Haitian Revolution—this is the first volume. There are multiple points of view among the white and black people of Haiti. A French doctor comes to Haiti to visit a sister who’s married a Haitian planter and about whom he’s concerned. Dr. Hébert, who becomes involved with a mulatto woman and has a child with her, who’s captured by the rebels and learns about medicinal herbs from Toussaint L’Overature, is the “touchstone” character, the one whose sensibilities are most like those of today’s readers. It was a brilliant decision on Bell’s part to have a white man who was not a Haitian colonial (with economic interests in plantations and slave labor) as an observer/participant, one who is of the same class as the planters (without their interests) but is able to accept human beings on their own merits. I understand he continues through the next two volumes of the trilogy. There is also third person narration that focuses on different characters, increasing Toussaint who was already old by Haitian slave standards, a Christian, and from a well-run plantation where slaves were not grossly mistreated. There’s some first person narrative by an African named Riau who remembers his homeland (Toussaint was born into slavery in Haiti) and who moves between Toussaint’s group and some more militant and violent groups. The first person narrative is Bell’s attempt, largely successful, to “get inside the head” of the rebels, in the form of an individual who’s intelligent enough to have some insight into the choices the rebels have. Bell provides ample historical material for the reader to understand the context of the only successful black revolution. It takes place during the unsettled period following the French Revolution. There exist in Haiti at the time not only the same groups of whites there were in the US during slavery (the upper class, who owned land and for whom the institution of slavery is critical and the middle class whites who were traders and shopkeepers and had other jobs and professions and whose wealth did not derive from the land), but political groups as well, those conservatives who supported the king (largely the plantation-owning class) as well as various revolutionary supporters. So to some extent French politics played out in Haiti. There was one governing official who deported those Frenchmen who disagreed with him back to France as traitors, and in some cases to the guillotine. There were also black rebels who were loyal to the king.There’s a year-by-year summary of historical events in an appendix—needed since most readers in English are not very familiar with Haitian history. There’s also an excellent glossary that allows Bell to use French and Creole words in the text because all of them are explained in the glossary. That allows him to initiate the reader into the Voodoo religion and Haitian traditions among whites, Creoles, mulattoes and blacks) as it touches on the events in the novel. It’s extraordinary how successful he is leading readers to understand the multiple points of view. Neither side is monolithic in its interests and values and both the rebels and the white defenders are complicated and changing coalitions of individuals and groups with various motivations. Bell’s narrative also moves back and forth in time, with the novel actually beginning as Toussaint is moved to a secure prison in France in 1802. The events, though, of this first volume mainly take place between 1791 and 1793.I already have the second volume…
—Susan
