Mudbound

Synopsis: When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud. As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

Review: I really enjoyed this one, great storytelling and a good cast of characters. From the first paragraph I was hooked.

'Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep. Any shallower and the corpse was liable to come rising up during the next big flood: 'Howdy boys! Remember me?' The thought of it kept us digging even after the blisters on our palms had burst, re-formed and burst again. Every shovelful was agony - the old man, getting in his last licks. Still, I was glad of the pain. It shoved away thought and memory.'

The story is told from the viewpoint of six characters - Jamie, Laura, Ronsel, Florence, Henry and Hap and they each have their own alternate chapters. It starts with the burial and then we go back to find out what happened to bring them to this point. Laura is city born and bred, at 31 she thought she was on the shelf forever, 'a spinster well on my way to petrifaction' but then she meets Henry McAllan. They marry and have two children but Henry's love of rural life soon leads him to buy a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta and Laura is given two weeks to prepare for their new life. Unfortunately, it won't just be the four of them, Henry's Pappy is to join them there. Pappy is the most snide, sly, malicious, hate filled old man that you could ever be saddled with as a father in law. They christen the farm Mudbound ... 'When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of my house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.'

Whilst Henry is nothing like as bad as his Pappy, he does share some of his unphilanthropic views. Henry's younger brother Jamie however is entirely different, he's charming, handsome and just that little bit wild and unpredictable. Despite the differences in their temperament Henry idolises his brother and Laura too finds herself attracted to him. Jamie's been away fighting in WW2 and has only lately joined Henry, Pappy and Laura at Mudbound. Hap and Florence are sharecroppers on Henry's farm, their son Ronsel has also been away fighting in WW2 but when he comes back home to Mississippi he finds nothing has changed. He finds black folk are still picking cotton, begging white folk's pardon and riding in the backs of buses. This is at odds with the relative freedom he has become used to in Europe, people were curious there because they were not used to seeing black people but once they became accustomed to him he was treated as an equal.

As well as racism of the dirtiest and most bigoted kind there is also polite racism, Laura comes to like and respect Florence but there are limits ... 'This is not to say that I thought of Florence and her family as equal to me and mine. I called her Florence and she called me Miz McAllan. She and Lilly May didn't use our outhouse, but did their business in the bushes out back. And when we sat down to the noon meal, the two of them ate outside on the porch.' ... The racial tension builds and builds in a land where the Klan are still very much in operation. Because of their shared wartime experiences Jamie and Ronsel become friends but this ultimately put's them, Ronsel especially, in great danger.

The ending is shocking and unsettling but you really do feel it coming and so it's not entirely unexpected. The author really breathes life into her characters and places, I felt like I knew the people well (all of those that narrated anyway) and could envisage Mudbound in all it's mud soaked, storm battered, soul sucking glory. A difficult read because of the subject matter but a totally engrossing one.