Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. … [I]t’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. –Ernest Hemingway

The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination. –T. S. Elliot

The truly profound meanings of the novel are generated by the impingement of the actual world of slavery, feuds, lynching, murder, and a spurious Christianity upon the ideal of the raft. –Leo Marx

(Quotes about Huckleberry Finn courtesy of English 311 at Gonzaga University.)

The Rift by Walter Jon Williams (writing as Walter J. Williams for reasons one can only wonder at), is the Huckleberry Finn of disaster novels. It begins by flashing back a thousand years to an earthquake that ravaged Mississippi Indian society. Each scene is headed with an extract of original documents from the 1811/1812 New Madrid earthquake, so you know exactly what’s going to happen by the time the novel is over. I didn’t pick up on a real pattern or progress to the captions, but they were interesting in and of themselves, for their language as well as the sharp cultural contrasts. For instance, in 1811 when people felt the earth move, they tended to assume they were having a fit or hallucinating until someone else confirmed that it was really happening. I wondered why they were so slow
to trust their own senses.

Disaster novels follow a certain format. All the random characters must be introduced in their pre-disaster settings before fate, S-waves and the River toss them together. There’s the displaced Californian teenager, the laid-off black defense worker, the ambitious stockbroker, the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the Klan sheriff on his way up in the world, the Army Corps of Engineers general in charge of keeping the Lower Mississippi between its banks, the man refueling his nuclear power plant (why is there always a nuclear power plant?), and the President of the United States, party affiliation unspecified. Those are just the main characters; the supporting characters, such as the Klansman’s wife, the defense worker’s ex-wife, the teenager’s divorced parents, the preacher’s wife with the odd craft project, the general’s banjo-playing husband, and many more, are also wonderfully drawn.

The inscriptions fueled my eagerness for earthshaking mayhem and destruction - if I didn’t want disaster, I wouldn’t have picked up a novel that promised to ravage everything near the Mississippi River from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico - but the characters themselves were so well-done that I began to get into them for their own sakes, and not just to keep track later once they were stumbling into each other through the rubble. Of course, that was when disaster struck.

The rubble, in this case, is floating down the Mississippi. The teenager survives the initial shock by luck and takes to the floodwaters in his neighbor’s fishing boat. He rescues the black man from a tree, beginning the main, Huckleberry Finnesqe plot of the novel. The preacher and the Klan Kleagle start out as sympathetic, if not particularly endearing, characters, and do a slow slide into evil that is far scarier than the earthquake itself (and it’s the worst of all possible earthquakes). The lady general and her husband are the most entertaining of all the characters, but my favorite was the President, who does his own slow slide into an indifference he insists makes no difference.

I picked this novel up intentionally to compare to Lucifer’s Hammer - one endangered nuclear power plant against another, no holds barred - but there’s no comparison. The Rift beats it on all scores besides death count, and verges on being a work of literature, besides. Someday people are going to wake up and realize that Walter Jon Williams can write circles around everyone else in SF. That he has to support himself by writing Star Wars novels is nothing short of… disastrous.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 14th, 2002 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Sci-Fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.