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"Watson's voice is an artistic triumph. . .[Bone by Bone] may well come to be regarded as a classic." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen speaks in the extraordinary voice of the enigmatic and dangerous E. J. Watson, whom we first saw, obliquely, through the eyes of his early twentieth-century Everglades community in Killing Mister Watson.
This astonishing new novel, calling to account the violence, virulent racism, and destruction of the land that fueled the so-called American Dream, points an accusing finger straight into the burning eyes of Uncle Sam. Here is the bloodied child of the Civil War and Reconstruction who dreams of recovering the family plantation. He becomes the gifted cane planter nearing success on a wilderness river when he gives in fatally to his accumulating demons. Powerfully imagined, prodigiously detailed, Bone by Bone is a literary tour de force as bold and ambitious as Watson himself.
"Like a true tragic figure, [Watson] knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin," said The New York Times. "This is a work of genuine dignity."
- Sales Rank: #805393 in Books
- Published on: 2000-07-18
- Released on: 2000-07-18
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.97" h x .95" w x 5.16" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 410 pages
Amazon.com Review
In Bone by Bone, the final chapter of Peter Matthiessen's Everglades trilogy, the man known variously as "Desperado" and "Emperor" Watson finally tells his own story--and a hard, ruthless, and singularly bloody tale it is. Brought up in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, Watson flees South Carolina after he's tagged for a murder he didn't commit. Bone by Bone follows his exile in the Indian Territories, his arrest for the murder of Belle Star, and his years in Florida, where he struggles to carve a sugar-cane empire out of the Everglades before being gunned down by a howling mob. "There's some that would say that Edgar Watson is a bad man by nature," he muses near the end of his life, but later declares, "I don't believe that men are born with a bad nature." So is Watson's fate nature or nurture? Is he a killer born or a killer made? This question lies at the heart of Matthiessen's tale as well as its precursors, Killing Mister Watson and Lost Man's River. Answering it would mean nothing less than answering the problem of evil itself.
In this case, the evil is inextricably twined with the good. Ed Watson loves his wives, a good laugh, and at least some of his children; he also murders and betrays employees and friends, all the while insisting that he "wanted to be an honest and upright citizen all my life." Somehow--and this is only one of Matthiessen's great achievements--the reader believes him. The reader also believes Watson's other defense: his crimes are no different from those of the great robber barons. His uncle, for instance, quotes South Carolina Governor James Hammond: "Sir, what is it that constitutes character, popularity, and power in the United States? Sir, it is property, and that only!" It is for property that Watson destroys himself and all those around him; it is for property that his son's beloved Everglades are hunted, fished, drained, and cleared to the brink of destruction. Bone by Bone is a distinctively American tragedy, as outsized and ambitious as E.J. Watson himself. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
This is the conclusion and capstone to Matthiessen's remarkable trilogy about the mysterious E.J. Watson, which began with Killing Mr. Watson (1991) and continued with Lost Man's River (1997). In those novels, the sons of the legendary southwest Florida entrepreneur and outlaw were engaged, at a time closer to our own, in digging out the man's story, trying to separate certifiable fact from the miasma of gossip and legend. This time, Matthiessen has given us Watson's own story in Watson's own words, and it is a book of heroic, even tragic, proportions. That story goes right back to Civil War days in South Carolina, and the terrible childhood E.J. endured at the hands of his drunken, brutal and rascally father and his remote and vindictive mother. Thus were laid the seeds of the later outbursts of violence and rage that so frequently punctuated what should have been a promising life. For Watson, as he portrays himself, is ambitious, hardworking and ever ingenious at figuring ways to make the remote Florida Everglades shores yield richesAa true pioneer spirit. He also makes clear, however, the fearful price paid for the development of wild America, not only the despoilation of the hauntingly evoked natural beauty but also the brutal disregard of any kind of human rights among the poor blacks and chain gang prisoners who bore the brunt of the exploiters' drive for wealth and power. Seldom has the profound and unthinking racism of the time (the narrative spans roughly 1860-1910) been so unsparingly presented. The narrative, though long and crowded with often bewilderingly interrelated characters, is also packed with dramatic action: many murders (including that of the legendary Belle Starr, when E.J. is temporarily resident in Indian Territory), ambushes, lynchings, drownings, jailings, a trial and a spectacular hurricane. Always Watson is striving for the respectability of wealth, always he is brought down by the conniving of his kinfolk, his tempers, his love of strong drink and his tormented inability to tolerate the lying and hypocrisy he finds everywhere around him. He is a monumental creation, and in bringing him and his amazing period to life with such vigor Matthiessen has created an unforgettable slice of deeply true and resonant American history. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
It's not quite accurate to say that this novel brings Matthiessen's trilogy on E.J. Watson to a satisfying conclusion, not because the novel is not itself splendid but because its events precede those in Killing Mister Waston (LJ 6/1/90) and Lost Man's River (LJ 11/15/97). In the first two books, Watson looms even after death as a tough, violent, larger-than-life figure whose origins and motivations remain enigmatic. Here, Matthiessen goes back to Watson's beginnings as a young boy growing up in a down-on-its-luck Southern family during and after the war, with a vicious father who failed as a soldier but beats his boy senseless and a mother who scorns her ill-bred spouse but won't protect her son. The roots of Watson's violence aren't just familial but societal, however, which is evident in the first pages of the book as the boy observes a murdered runaway slave with a mix of sorrow and cool indifference. Readers can see how the system of slavery cheapened life for everyone it touched, and in the story that follows, the boy's constant betrayal by those around him is neatly balanced by his own implacable savagery. Matthiessen makes you feel, viscerally, how hate begets hate. A rich, provocative novel, sometimes overwritten, but who cares.
-ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A "Bone" to Pick
By Dale W. Boyer
By all rights, this third part of Matthiesson's trilogy should have been the juiciest entry, since Watson tells the details of his bloody story himself. However, the book proves to be disappointingly pedestrian, with Matthiesson going back and sketching out Watson's early life, "explaining" how he got to be as hard-hearted as he did, etc. The linear approach is a mistake, I think, and a bad one; indeed, in his obsession with local color and period detail, Matthiessen seems to have forgotten the basic components of a novel -- seems to have forgotten, indeed, how to reward readers who have made their way patiently through almost 1400 pages of material. A book where Watson told his story from the time he came to the Everglades to the end, with the occasional flashback, would have been riveting. Instead, we get transcripts of trials, and again, mountains of information to sift through. Actually, that's been the problem with the series as a whole: as much as I find it intermittently interesting, and as well as Matthiessen can write at times, he's let the details and the chronology overwhelm him here, swamping the narrative drive and making it all seem very plodding. His other mistake, I think, is trying to explain Watson's character, more or less giving reasons for his evil nature. But evil is most interesting when it's an enigma. I don't buy the bland childhood scenes, the awful father who "makes" Watson into what he is. Matthiessen should have just let evil be evil and got on with the story. I also don't buy Watson's voice throughout: I keep hearing Matthiessen behind it, blandly filling out episodes most readers will care very little about. The most riveting section of the whole series comes in the second book when we get the 3 or 4 page version of the killing of the Tuckers written out by R.B. Watson. What a shame that Matthiessen couldn't have matched that kind of intensity for the conclusion of his monumental saga. Sadly, much as I love Matthiessen, I'd advise readers to call it quits after Killing Mr. Watson (as Matthiessen should have). It's the best of the lot.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Self-Portrait of a Villain
By J C E Hitchcock
"Bone by Bone" is the final instalment of Peter Matthiessen's "Watson Trilogy". This ambitious series of novels aimed to tell the story of a man's life as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries ("Killing Mr Watson"), the same man's life as seen by posterity ("Lost man's River") and finally his life as seen by the man himself. In "Bone by Bone" Edgar Watson tells the story of his own life, starting with his childhood in South Carolina during and after the Civil War, and ending with his killing by a mob in Southern Florida in 1910.
The early parts of this novel are probably the best, particularly the descriptions of Watson's miserable childhood at the hands of his brutal, drunken father Elijah ("Ring-Eye Lige"). Elijah Watson (who himself played a less than glorious part in the war) stands as a symbol of the defeated post-bellum South -its disillusionment, its senseless racist violence, its desperate attempts to justify itself through the myth of the "Great Lost Cause". The teenage Edgar, hard working and determined, attempts to rise above the poverty and degradation into which his once-proud family have fallen, but his attempts are doomed when he is falsely accused of the murder of Selden Tilghman, a relative who has angered local opinion by his liberal, anti-slavery sentiments, and is forced to flee his home state.
The novel proceeds to relate Watson's life as seen through his own eyes. The rest of his life is mostly spent in Florida, with brief spells in Oklahoma and Arkansas. In time, Watson rises out of poverty to become a prosperous sugar-cane planter in the Everglades, but at the same time his character deteriorates, until by the end of his life he has become as violent and ruthless as his father, ready to exploit, bully, threaten or even murder those who stand in his way and to sacrifice or alienate his family and friends in pursuit of his ambitions.
"Bone by Bone" is better than its predecessor in the trilogy, "Lost Man's River", the dull story of Watson's son Lucius and his attempts to find out the truth about his father's legacy. Neither of the two later books, however, are as good as the first volume, "Killing Mr Watson", which tells Watson's story through the eyes of a number of those who knew him using a "multiple narrator" technique. This technique enables Mr Matthiessen to maintain an intriguing ambiguity. There is no authoritative author's voice to tell us whether Watson is good or evil or a mixture of the two, or whether his killing was bloody murder or a justified act of self-defence. The fascination of the book is that the reader must work this out for himself or herself, and different readers will (I suspect) come to different conclusions.
In "Bone by Bone" we finally get to hear the authoritative version of Watson's life- his own- and the ambiguity is lost. In the early part of the book, Watson may come across as a man more sinned against than sinning, but by the end any sympathy we may have had for him has been lost as we realise that his neighbours' suspicions of him were, by and large, justified. (This revelation will come as no surprise to those who have read "Lost Man's River"). The first-person narrative means that Watson dominates this book to an excessive extent; selfish and self-obsessed, he takes little interest in those around him, except insofar as they can be useful to him or stand in his way. The other people in the story do not therefore emerge as characters in their own right as they did in "Killing Mr Watson", and we have no voice to counterbalance Watson's own. The book works as a powerfully-written character-study of a villainous character, but its lack of any sympathetic figure to balance its central villain meant that I did not find it a very enjoyable read.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Read "Killing Mr. Watson" First!
By John Noodles
This final installment in the "Mr. Watson" trilogy is, alas, in some ways the most disappointing. This isn't to say it isn't enjoyable, but having made it through both "Killing Mr. Watson" and "Lost Man's River," it's difficult, and perhaps unreasonable, to expect us not to judge this book in the light of its predecessors.
This book is a much easier read than the detective-like "Lost Man's River," which followed Lucius Watson's seemingly interminable journey all over Florida as he hunted for evidence of his father's innocence. In "Bone by Bone," told in the first person from the perspective of E.J. Watson himself, the mystery and doubt so perfectly balanced with drama and violence in "Killing Mr. Watson" is removed. Watson tells his own story, shows us how he became the violent man he is, and reveals to the reader his whole person.
The names in this book are confusing...I can't recall reading a book in which so many names are thrown at you. There is a gloss of family relationships at the beginning of the book, which helps somewhat, but I still found myself losing track of people, especially since we were dealing with members of the same family.
In both "Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone," Matthiessen editorializes--through his characters--quite a bit about race issues. Given that these stories are situated in the post-Civil War South, it is not inappropriate that there should be some race issues, but the manner in which the characters editorialize (rather than letting the action of the narrative speak for itself) makes that commentary stick out like a broken wing. The problem of race, and the situation of blacks, becomes less an organic part of the story (as it is in Faulkner) than asides the writer makes to remind us of the racial horrors of the Reconstruction South.
Watson's voice is clear throughout, although there are certain inconsistencies. He speaks for the most part in elevated, literary English (using complex metaphor, at times). We are told that as a child he read the Greek classics. Nevertheless, he cannot spell, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, he lapses into backwoods diction.
In "Killing Mr. Watson," Watson came off as a brooding, violent, secretive man. Here, we see the guts of the man, the joker, the father, the husband. This side is effectively blended with the violence and the brooding we saw earlier. It will be hard to appreciate this, though, if you haven't first read "Killing Mr. Watson." (You don't really need to read "Lost Man's River" to get the full effect of this noverl, although you will be more sensitive to the drama involving Lucius and Rob.)
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