In 1855, Henry Townsend, a former slave who is now the owner of 33 slaves and 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Virginia, lies dying on his bed. His wife, Caldonia, "a coloured woman born free and who had been educated all her days", offers to quiet his mind with a little reading. "A bit of Milton?" she suggests. "Or the Bible?" "I been so weary of Milton," Henry says. "And the Bible suits me better in the day, when there's sun and I can see what all God gave me."
One great achievement of Edward Jones's Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Known World is the circumscription of its moral vision, which locates the struggle between good and evil not in the vicissitudes of the diabolical slaveholding system of the American south, but inside the consciousness of each person, black or white, slave or free, who attempts to flourish within that soul-deadening system. There are no real heroes or heroines in the populous world of this novel, nor are there unmitigated villains, though there are many who fail to live honourably despite the best intentions.
The characters come in related sets. There are white southerners and free blacks, including the youthful Henry Townsend, his future wife Caldonia, and his parents, Augustus and Mildred. Slaves, some of whom eventually become free, include Henry's first purchase, Moses; Alice, a madwoman who turns out to be an artist; and the family of Elias and Celeste Freemen, a clan so numerous that "in 1993 the University of Virginia Press would publish a 415-page book by a white woman, Marcia H Shia, documenting that every 97th person in the Commonwealth of Virginia was kin, by blood or by marriage, to the line that started with Celeste and Elias Freemen".
In some ways The Known World is a 19th-century concoction, rich in character and plot, comprised of chapters with ironic titles (in "A Modest Proposal", free black slaveholders at a tea party discuss the provocations of abolitionist pamphlets) and narrated by an omniscient voice that can penetrate into the souls of the characters even as they leave their bodies behind. It's a hothouse world, thickly settled, endlessly policed, characterised by cruelty, brutality, and the same preoccupation with "propriety" that makes the works of Edith Wharton and Henry James so deeply frightening. Loyalties are byzantine and constantly shifting.
Summarising the plot of this rewarding novel is a hopeless enterprise. A lot happens. Time is fluid. Characters appear with their fate flung out before them. "My daddy made it for me," a slave child, Tessie, responds to a question about her doll. In the next sentence she is on her deathbed. "She would repeat those words just before she died, a little less than 90 years later." In sly Borgesian touches, intruders from the recent past and the distant future - a census taker, an itinerant Canadian pamphleteer, the genealogist who investigates the Freemen lineage - interrupt the narrative to provide documentation. God is afoot (this is America) and talks to folks when he feels like it.
The Known World is not an easy read, but it's a powerful experience. Through all the furious conflagration there flows the ironic, sympathetic, distant voice of the narrator, a voice that understands the madness of slavery as part of a grander picture, one that begins with bright angels clanging closed the gates on our progenitors, and Satan, cast on to the burning plain, vowing ever "out of good still to find means of evil". The Miltonic cosmos, in which human endeavour is a battlefield upon which outside forces exploit us to settle an ancient and extraterrestrial score, permeates the atmosphere of Manchester country, and those preoccupied with peace, order and justice will seek them in vain.
Long after Henry's death, his teacher fondly recalls the boy's fascination with Paradise Lost." 'Ain't that a thing to say' is what he said of the Devil who proclaimed that he would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. He thought only a man who knew himself well could say such a thing, could turn his back on God with just finality. I tried to make him see what a horrible choice that was, but Henry had made up his mind about that and I could not turn him back."
· Valerie Martin's Property won the 2003 Orange prize.
