Customer Reviews

Kentucky Blues

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If you're a fan of Robinson's war novels, this is a great opportunity to see his story-telling talents turned in another direction. His sharp, witty dialogue, realistic details and bittersweet story elements make this a great novel about 2 families (and their strange neighbors and friends) that feud in a small river town in Kentucky before, during and after the Civil War. His typically unsympathetic views of his own characters, their motivations and actions really enrich this story. I strongly recommend it if you love Derek Robinson's work, or even if you've never heard of him, and just want to read a great novel full of fascinating characters set in a pivotal time in America's history.

Robinson is known mostly for books like PIECE OF CAKE, about the Royal Air Force at the start of World War Two. He's also written a number of great books about spies, but they all land squarely and comfortably in the middle of the 20th century. KENTUCKY BLUES is a different beast altogether. Set between about 1830 and 1870, it takes place almost entirely in a small fictional backwater town and boasts a large cast of realistically ridiculous characters.

Kentucky was one of the in-between states during the Civil War, neither Union nor Confederate, and that helps fuel some of Robinson's plot. The farmers own slaves, but their farms are not the massive plantations of the Deep South that we know from "Gone With the Wind". Slave-owning is just a way of life, and one that everyone regrets seeing the end of. Everyone except the slaves, who are now free (according to one ex-slave-owner, they were stolen by President Lincoln). But free to do what? No one wants them around. No one will hire them or pay them to do anything. All they can do is build themselves some shacks up in the hills and try to make do. The townsfolk have enough problems of their own, with bushwhackers, carpet-baggers, anvil-launching competitions, and a murder trial so preposterous it would make Atticus Finch break down and cry. There's also a cattle drive which makes me wish that Mr. Robinson would just write a full-blown Western novel.

The story is a long and rambling one, full of action and comedy and overflowing with Robinson's usual sharp dialogue. It's not his usual setting, but doesn't suffer for it, and the subject matter benefits greatly from the outsider's perspective. I suppose everyone is entitled to take their own history seriously, which is why Derek Robinson is such an important writer: without sacrificing the historical truth, he strips away the layers of solemnity and shows us the past for what it really was, with all the irony and slapstick intact.

This book just seems to ramble along like a wagon with one square wheel. The character development is incongruous and unconvincing and the book is full of inconsistencies. A waste of time.