The story gets a little wobbly toward the end, with Boys from Brazil undertones more befitting sci-fi, a genre in which Winters has also worked. For the most part, Winters neatly blends dystopian fiction with old-fashioned procedural. Winters probes the possibilities: outside the Hard Four, who benefits from the trade in human flesh? Where do new slaves come from, now that transcontinental traffic is banned? How deeply can his antiheroic hero, a manumitted slave–turned–bounty hunter currently calling himself Victor, participate in the system without being forever stained? He has his motives, understandable if not noble, that send him careening into other people’s self-interests he’s on the hunt for a runaway named Jackdaw who may have hopped a plane for China with a pile of Southern T-shirts-or who may instead have made his way to someplace relatively safe, like Indianapolis. is still part-slave, part-free, with the “Hard Four” states-a unified North and South Carolina foremost among them-clinging resolutely to the old ways even as those pesky moralists the Europeans “draw no distinction between the slavery-practicing states and the slavery-tolerating ones” and as right-thinking Northerners figure out ways to resist the modern equivalent of the Fugitive Slave Act. That’s the territory that Winters ( The Last Policeman, 2012, etc.) explores in this memorable tale. Imagine: there was no Civil War, and the Confederacy has morphed into a low-tech Matrix.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |