Customer Reviews

Bone by Bone

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I didn't whiz through this as I did "Killing Mister Watson", but Ed Watson tells his own story well enough to hold the reader.

What amazed me as the end approaches and upon reflection, is that the story of Ed Watson, fictionalized as it is, offers food for thought about the thin line that can separate classic American rags to riches stories and those who, for various reasons, can't seem to make it over the hump. Watson had the strength, drive and natural intelligence, but couldn't overcome his weaknesses and his past. That makes this story, and the whole trilogy, a true American tragedy (much like Theodore Driser's novel, but with darker, dirtier characters).

And the funny thing is, the second I finished this book, I grabbed Killing Mister Watson and spent hours going back and forth between books. It's an interesting sensation.

My Mother's family and many of her friends lived in the South Florida frontier in the early part of the century. I've heard many stories of their adventures, and the "characters" they knew, which included the famous Mr. Watson. I've read and enjoyed the three Matthiessen books,(Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River, Bone by Bone) each more than once. the writing, the insights, the research all are impressive and exciting. I wish there were more coming. Bone by Bone is clearly a culmination of a life's work. The author speaks with an authentic voice and soul in this particular novel, and these strange and unfamiliar histories come alive.

This final installment in the "Mr. Watson" trilogy is, alas, in some ways the most disappointing. This isn't to say it isn't enjoyable, but having made it through both "Killing Mr. Watson" and "Lost Man's River," it's difficult, and perhaps unreasonable, to expect us not to judge this book in the light of its predecessors.

This book is a much easier read than the detective-like "Lost Man's River," which followed Lucius Watson's seemingly interminable journey all over Florida as he hunted for evidence of his father's innocence. In "Bone by Bone," told in the first person from the perspective of E.J. Watson himself, the mystery and doubt so perfectly balanced with drama and violence in "Killing Mr. Watson" is removed. Watson tells his own story, shows us how he became the violent man he is, and reveals to the reader his whole person.

The names in this book are confusing...I can't recall reading a book in which so many names are thrown at you. There is a gloss of family relationships at the beginning of the book, which helps somewhat, but I still found myself losing track of people, especially since we were dealing with members of the same family.

In both "Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone," Matthiessen editorializes--through his characters--quite a bit about race issues. Given that these stories are situated in the post-Civil War South, it is not inappropriate that there should be some race issues, but the manner in which the characters editorialize (rather than letting the action of the narrative speak for itself) makes that commentary stick out like a broken wing. The problem of race, and the situation of blacks, becomes less an organic part of the story (as it is in Faulkner) than asides the writer makes to remind us of the racial horrors of the Reconstruction South.

Watson's voice is clear throughout, although there are certain inconsistencies. He speaks for the most part in elevated, literary English (using complex metaphor, at times). We are told that as a child he read the Greek classics. Nevertheless, he cannot spell, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, he lapses into backwoods diction.

In "Killing Mr. Watson," Watson came off as a brooding, violent, secretive man. Here, we see the guts of the man, the joker, the father, the husband. This side is effectively blended with the violence and the brooding we saw earlier. It will be hard to appreciate this, though, if you haven't first read "Killing Mr. Watson." (You don't really need to read "Lost Man's River" to get the full effect of this noverl, although you will be more sensitive to the drama involving Lucius and Rob.)

By all rights, this third part of Matthiesson's trilogy should have been the juiciest entry, since Watson tells the details of his bloody story himself. However, the book proves to be disappointingly pedestrian, with Matthiesson going back and sketching out Watson's early life, "explaining" how he got to be as hard-hearted as he did, etc. The linear approach is a mistake, I think, and a bad one; indeed, in his obsession with local color and period detail, Matthiessen seems to have forgotten the basic components of a novel -- seems to have forgotten, indeed, how to reward readers who have made their way patiently through almost 1400 pages of material. A book where Watson told his story from the time he came to the Everglades to the end, with the occasional flashback, would have been riveting. Instead, we get transcripts of trials, and again, mountains of information to sift through. Actually, that's been the problem with the series as a whole: as much as I find it intermittently interesting, and as well as Matthiessen can write at times, he's let the details and the chronology overwhelm him here, swamping the narrative drive and making it all seem very plodding. His other mistake, I think, is trying to explain Watson's character, more or less giving reasons for his evil nature. But evil is most interesting when it's an enigma. I don't buy the bland childhood scenes, the awful father who "makes" Watson into what he is. Matthiessen should have just let evil be evil and got on with the story. I also don't buy Watson's voice throughout: I keep hearing Matthiessen behind it, blandly filling out episodes most readers will care very little about. The most riveting section of the whole series comes in the second book when we get the 3 or 4 page version of the killing of the Tuckers written out by R.B. Watson. What a shame that Matthiessen couldn't have matched that kind of intensity for the conclusion of his monumental saga. Sadly, much as I love Matthiessen, I'd advise readers to call it quits after Killing Mr. Watson (as Matthiessen should have). It's the best of the lot.

"Bone by Bone" is not Matthiessen's best work, or even the best of the Watson trilogy. But no matter: sometimes even Homer nodded, and anything by Matthiessen is better than almost anything else.

Matthiessen deserves a Nobel Prize. Who else could write nonfiction as beautiful as "Wildlife in America" or fiction like the incomparable "Far Tortuga"? "Far Tortuga", in fact, may turn out to be one of the 6 or 8 very best novels of the passing century: it is unique, unprecedented, out-of-nowhere, and yet it is one of the most true and moving and beautiful novels I've ever read.

So read "Bone by Bone", but let it provoke you to read all of Matthessien's other work as well.

Warning: don't trespass on this novel! It's the third of Peter Matthiessen's ponderous trilogy of novels re-and-retelling the 'legendary' life of Florida pioneer Edgar Watson. All three novels were subsequently re-edited into a single still ponderous volume titled "Shadow Country", which won a National Book Award. If you haven't read the first two volumes of the trilogy, you really ought not to touch "Bone By Bone". You would be in serious danger of 'believing' its first-person narrative, the fictional voice of Mr. Watson. "Bone by Bone" is, in a sense, easy reading. Entertaining. Colorfully descriptive. Stylish, in a somewhat pretentious literary vein. But where does any truth lie, that is the question! Or rather, does any lie ever approach truth.

The first volume of the trilogy, "Killing Mister Watson", recounts the slaying of the notorious swamp-dweller in the semi-cogent dialect of the Thousand Island community, as 'recalled' by a dozen or more witnesses/participants. It's a fragmented, contradictory, inchoate narrative, a testament/testimonial to a community's sense of a shameful past. The second volume, "Lost Man's River" is even more obtuse, obscure, obfuscating -- deliberately so -- as the son of Watson ponders the truth of his father's imponderable character.

And that brings us to the third volume, Bone by Bone, in which Mr. Watson tells his own story, from his abused childhood to his destined death. It is, of course, a posthumous confession, by definition an impossible testimony. The defunct Mr. Watson speaks no corrupted back-country dialect! His language is as elegant as a "cavalier' heritage could claim, and in fact, through his mother, Mr. Watson stakes some claim to a genteel plantation heritage, some blood-ties to the ante-bellum Athens of the South, indeed some knowledge of the Greek classics. But is Watson plausible? Not as a fictionalized character, I ask, but as a witness in his own behalf? That's the whole point, I think, of the trilogy; the reader MUST be prepared to doubt. Is Watson a self-justifying hypocrite? Or is he a cunning fabulist, a natural liar, a plausible sociopath? Or is he the iconic victim of a culture vilely putrified by its own history of violence and greed?

"Bone by Bone" is too plausible for its own good! It's too easy to "take" Watson's side, if one hasn't already confronted the ambiguity of truth in the previous volumes. Possibly this 'danger' is what prompted Peter Matthiessen to reshape the trilogy as a single book. Sorry, dear readers, but you have to EARN your sense of Watson's moral ambiguity by churning though the thousand-plus pages of the other books first. And even so, I'll wager that many of you will be fooled ...

This book is a masterpeice by one of America's greatest living authors, and is the best of the Mr. Watson trilogy. It is haunting. I give it my highest recommendation.

A brilliant finale to what is surely one of the finest projects ever produced by an American writer. Peter Matthiessen is a genius.

This book takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem:

"There is a pain - so utter - it swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance so Memory can step
Around - across - upon it
As one within a swoon - goes safely - where an open eye -
Would Drop him -Bone by Bone."

Matthiessen takes us through the dark substance in the novel with "an open eye," and it is no hyperbole to say that by the end of it one feels that one has indeed been dropped "bone by bone" into hollow, lonely, merciless places in the landscape of the human soul where one tries not to venture too often. In short, Bone by Bone - much more so than the previous two novels in the Watson trilogy - is a deeply unsettling book. One feels one has to pull oneself back together after reading it.

From the cruel horror of the "Owl Man" in Watson's youth in South Carolina until the last pages when his mortal coil is blown away on a Florida beach, we are struck by manifestations of what Watson's educated wife tells him Miss Dickinson has concluded, to wit, that "the true nature of nature was malevolent." Watson ruminates over this darkly, "Only an egotistical pontificator could regard such an engine of danger without awe, or dare to dismiss it as detestable - unless, of course, this poet was privy to some heavenly information that the Creator detested his own creation."

Gradually Watson - along with the reader - is led into this world-view. Here is Watson contemplating one of the few murders to which he admits in the book:

"A man is quick, eyes bright, mouth shining, and the next moment he is extinguished, twitching the last of his lost life away in his own mess. There is no being anymore, only the soiled carcass, eyes wide, mouth wide, shivering and jerking as death takes it. A life is gone like the sun flash of a minnow in the current."

In conclusion, this is not a book to be enjoyed (as Killing Mr. Watson is, perhaps, because of the Watson myth which permeates so much of the book), but rather to be treasured as a courageous author's showing us a side of the world and ourselves that very few authors indeed take up pen to describe, the part of our world that is,

"....some realm where right and wrong have little meaning and where the sinner plays at being human, having become some unnatural damned thing howling alone in the wilderness where even God can't find him, let alone redeem him."

I'm glad to have read this book and this trilogy. But I'm equally glad to be able to step back from it now and start breathing more freely again.

A masterful achievement.

This is the finest and most enjoyable novel I have read this year. Unlike many reviewers, I have not read the previous books in the series. This novel tells the story of E. J. Watson in the first person, from his boyhood in South Carolina during the reconstruction till the moment when he is gunned down by a mob in Florida in 1910. A long, complex, detailed narrative full of people, character, information, and history, it works on many levels, and is most amazing to contemplate when one has finished reading it. Mr. Watson had a brutal childhood, and was fixated early in life on becoming a man of property and restoring his family honor. He in fact becomes a murderer, exploiter, trouble maker, and terrorizer of blacks. From his own perspective, we also see a man truly in love with each of his three wives, having a generous sense of humor, trying to be decent and upstanding, and aware of his own evil. Peter Matthiessen's book is a powerful evocation of the complex trajectory of a human life, and the paradox of any attempt to reconcile an external judgement of that life with the experience of how it was to have lived it.