North And South – John Jakes, 1982 ★★

Too Thick for its Own Good

Why do big, thick fiction novels invest in me a sense of awe that smaller tomes do not? Do I not recall Hemingway’s thoughts on the value of concision? Or how a tight narrative framework often works best, even when the subject is the American Civil War?

You can fit The Red Badge Of Courage in your pocket or purse. Good luck trying that with North And South.

John Jakes followed up the amazing success of his eight-volume “Kent Family Chronicles” by kicking off what proved an even bigger commercial triumph, the story of two American families united in duty but driven apart by war and the “peculiar institution” known as slavery. The result is a hodgepodge of crafty plotting and loose writing, of flat characters and engaging storycraft.

Who am I to quibble? It launched a successful trilogy that sold in the millions. But I found it much too thick a book.

We meet Orry Main and George Hazard at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, 1842. Orry is from a rice plantation in South Carolina, while George comes from a family of iron tycoons in Pennsylvania. Fast friends at the outset, their time together as plebes at the Point deepens their friendship. But as time goes on, their friendship is tested.

Plebes assembled on the grounds of West Point, circa 1870. One observer explains: “Some say the Academy is a haven for aristocrats, but that’s a canard. The true nature of the Academy is this: it’s the source of the best scientific education available in America.”
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_USMA_Corps_in_mid_1800s.jpg

Enslaving black Americans is still the law and profitable business in Orry’s South, about which plantation prince Orry is both conflicted and defensive. Meanwhile, more people up north see the issue as unacceptable, eventually including George, who hopes somehow for a gradual and peaceful approach. But war fever is hard to contain.

George’s wife lays out the dilemma and the thesis of this novel:

“How can this country survive if friends can’t rise above the quarrel? If men like you and Orry – decent, reasonable men – don’t find a solution to the problem, can you imagine the alternative? The future will be in the hands of the Southern fire eaters and the John Browns.”

When that future indeed unfolds, our story is propelled to a concussive conclusion at the battlements of Fort Sumter near Orry’s home.

I think the above quote is useful as it is shows both North And South’s unique premise as well as its ponderous treatment in Jakes’ hands. The idea of presenting the run-up to the Civil War from the simultaneous points of view of parties on both sides is fertile with promise. Jakes’ approach is to give both sides equal weight, not to judge but offer up good-willed individuals of opposite views to root for and care about. This tack works surprisingly well through most of the book.

But read the quote again, and ask yourself: Who talks like that?

Well, imagine people talking like that for nearly 740 pages, and you see why I had a hard time with this novel. Heft is great when the plot is working, but here you get a lot of speechifying and conversational history lessons as the narrative takes a hard turn into Tropeland.

Patrick Swayze (pre-Dirty Dancing) played Orry Main and James Read co-starred as George Hazard in a 1985 U. S. television miniseries adaptation of North And South that was every bit as successful as the novel, and also carried forward into two further installments.
Image from https://screenrant.com/north-south-show-remake-updates-release-date-story/

Couples find love against all odds. Lone men of honor stand up for what they believe in. Bad guys commit to evil schemes careless of consequences, so long as it can result in serious viciousness.

Nothing but the saving of his own skin, his own reputation, came before revenge against the Mains and the Hazards. He need only wait and, at the appropriate moment, strike.

The character above, Elkanah Bent, is our principal adversary, marked by cowardice, sadism, sexual depravity, corruption, and hypocrisy. You can say much the same about the host of other baddies that cram this novel, except the evil women, who are usually either oversexed and/or insane.

Historical fiction has done this since before Dumas and Scott; filling a clearly-defined canvas is much easier when characters employed to that end don’t have depth. But whatever the people and situations of North And South offer in plot service they lack in flash or uniqueness.

The novel begins oddly, with forefathers of the Hazard and Main clans taking up their generations-defining roles of ironworker and slaver. From there we fast-forward 200 years to West Point, where George and Orry clash with Bent while befriending future historical personages like Lee, Grant, Pickett, and Thomas (not yet Stonewall) Jackson. Then it’s on to war in Mexico, and a debilitating injury that reveals battle’s true nature.

Neither George nor Orry is eager for more war; North And South builds its focus around the desperate search for a middle ground in a time where such a thing is probably impossible.

Orry’s older brother Cooper, a businessman, lays out the dilemma:

“I despise those damn abolitionists with all their self-righteous breastbeating. But their hypocrisy doesn’t blind me to the truth of some of their charges. The moment anyone dares to criticize the way we do things in the South, we all become as defensive as treed porcupines. The Yankees say slavery is wrong, so we claim it’s a blessing.”

The two faces of Southern living, circa 1850: Bemoans Orry's brother, Cooper: “This is the age of the machine, and we refuse to acknowledge it. We cling to agriculture and our past, while we fall farther and farther out of step.”
Image from https://www.exploros.com/social-studies/us-history-through-1877/industrialization/southern-society

Jakes’ handling of slavery was a stark reminder of how different everything was just 40 years ago. I doubt North And South would or could be published by a major house today just as written. It isn’t just N-words flying thick and fast through the entire book, even from the lips of some of the most likable characters. More triggeringly, North And South presents the whole question of slavery as a negotiable evil, as something that moderates might perhaps eliminate by reimbursing slaveholders for their lost labor. Call them “reparations,” if you will.

But as a point of view, this approach works from a historical as well as a fictional perspective. Lincoln was in favor of just such a settlement to end slavery without bloodshed, and referencing this allows Jakes to give his readers Southern characters with real rooting interest, without sugarcoating what it was they wound up fighting for.

So while problematic, this pro-moderate perspective offers dynamic tension. War is bad, yes? What weakens the reading experience for me are the ways Jakes spins out his narrative arcs with other members of the extended Main and Hazard clans. All of them fall into the same buckets of heroic good characters or nasty villains.

The worst subplot involves Orry’s unconsummated affair with Madeline, wife of a no-good neighbor, which becomes quite tedious as it goes on and on. Unfortunately, Jakes’ inclusion of numerous romantic subplots, the only way he seems able to get in female characters, ties down his narrative with some of its most rote and soppy passages:

“If we love each other enough, we can survive anything. So can our families. So can the country.”

John Brown, abolitionist, as depicted on a mural in the Kansas state capitol. In North And South, Brown briefly detains train passenger Orry Main during his famous, bloody at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. “We let the lunatics reign,” Orry concludes.
Image from https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/john-brown-s-christmas-raid-missouri-1858/

The one female who stands out as different is Virgilia Hazard, the crazed abolitionist and George’s sister. I respected Jakes’ boldness including her, as her ranting zeal pushes against her brother’s less extreme steps in the same direction and makes for a different kind of friction than north-vs-south. To end slavery, Virgilia craves bloodshed and nothing less. Jakes pushes this to the point where she becomes utterly unconvincing.

The once-solid plotting eventually suffers from convenience, too: Whenever a nemesis needs to have some important piece of information or an upper hand from which to threaten the good characters, it is handed to them by chance. Whenever the good guys need a break, it is likewise provided.

The worst part of the book is the long middle section, where I really sensed Jakes trying to shore up his page count with long passages drawing out the history lessons.

One baddie ejaculates: “More of the infernal Republican groups are forming up North, and they all want the same damn thing – repeal of the fugitive-slave laws and the Kansas-Nebraska bill.”

Later come references to Dred Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, and that charming new tune “Dixie” people are singing. Very on-the-nose stuff.

North And South does improve in its final third – first as one of the Mains is tasked to break up a Comanche raid in Texas, later by the run-up to the attack on Fort Sumter. The thin, soap-operaish romances remain prominent, but the plot finds a higher gear and stays there to the end. Jakes’ description of an embroiled Charlestown is a high point:

Orry saw three young swaggerers of the town jabbing an old Negro with their canes...He saw a respected member of the Methodist church with the neck of a bottle protruding from his side pocket; the man clung to a black iron hitching post, puking into the street. He saw the wife of a Meeting Street jeweler leaning back in a dark doorway while a stranger fondled her. Excess was everywhere.

The three volumes of Jakes' "North And South" trilogy, with Love And War set during the war and Heaven And Hell just after it. All three were major bestsellers in the 1980s.
Image from https://www.amazon.com/North-South-Trilogy-Love-Heaven/dp/B001MXX1JG 

The Jakes approach of mixing sex and history perfected in The Bastard is watered down here; the romantic interludes are tepid talkfests for the most part, while historical figures inserted into the story have little impact on the plot. Most of these are introduced in the West Point section in the form of callout cameos with a line or two to Orry and George.

North And South is a lot of book, but what’s inside doesn’t justify its heft. At times it is a decent historical potboiler, but a near-total lack of subtlety and nuance grated on me, especially when the plot ran sideways through the long middle chapters. I got reengaged some before its end, but not near enough to want to read books two and three in this trilogy.