O Beulah Land

Beulah Quintet #2

by Mary Lee Settle

O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet ―Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom―is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and builds the beginning of a flourishing estate named Beulah. The novel closes shortly before the commencement of the Revolutionary War, with Lacey elected to the House of Burgesses and his family line firmly established in what is to become the state of West Virginia.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Southern, Fiction

388 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 1981

About the author

Graduate of Sweet Briar College. Winner of the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie.

Reviews

[Jim Grimsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first-written book of Settle's quintet about American identity and I think it is an impressive piece of writing in many ways, especially in the authority with which it creates the world. It is easy to forget what that notion of a more savage time entails. The world of colonial Virginia in the 18th century was made up of so much violence, the struggle of the law to maintain its authority, and the almost impossible effort of people to make a daily life composed of some comfort and love and family. The fact that this all happens in land that is being wrested away from its original occupants is endemic to the drama. This book at its best makes all those trials felt and the struggles of people to make a new life are moving. She is also adept at weaving the ideas that concern her - the origin of the ideals of liberty and their collision with the reality of slavery, the theft of land from the people of the First Nations, the retributions exacted by all of this. She has an economy of style that is admirable and a beauty of diction when writing of landscape. The novel suffers, in my view, from its scope: it covers periods of specific drama spaced out over forty or fifty years, and its cast of characters is large. Settle does a brave job of handling all this, but the result is that many of the people drawn here appear childlike and distant, and there are no good examples of people drawn in their complexity. Her novel Prisons, which is the first installment of this series, was written much later and is a better novel than this one, I think; she focuses the book on one character and makes him fully concrete, limiting the world to what he could utter about it in his own voice. But O Beulah Land is nevertheless a lovely novel. A modern reader would want a fuller depiction of the slaves, less dialect spelling, and more of an examination of race. At least this reader did. The slaves are mostly faceless and utilitarian. The First Nations characters are largely the same. But in fact so are the settlers with only a few exceptions. This is a book of ambition but in the end the ambition is not achieved, but there is some greatness in the attempt.

[Chad · Rating 1 out of 5]

The truth is that I did not read the whole book. I did not even read most of it.

I read the first book in the Beulah Quintet, Prisons, first. A member of my Significant Other's family picked up a used copy of it and gave it to me in a book exchange; I don't remember what book I gave her. It took me most of a year to get around to reading it, but once I started it I ended up getting completely absorbed in what turned out to be an amazing piece of literature. I decided I needed to read the rest of the Beulah Quintet based on the strength of that one book, and thought that Mary Lee Settle must be an incredibly talented author. O Beulah Land is the second book in the quintet, so of course that book would come next in the series.

I finally got around to picking up O Beulah Land. It was difficult to get into the book. The language was overwrought at first, purple and ponderously cryptic. The floweriness of it eventually started to recede, but the crypticness of the narrative style only increased. The author's style in this book lent itself to utterly failing to convey information necessary to understand character motivations, chains of causation, or why the reader picked up the book in the first place. Where Prisons managed to use the oft-fumbled literary device of flashbacks to establish and enrich a deeply involving story with a masterful touch, O Beulah Land basically just feels like a jumble of events hacked together in the order in which the author imagined them without any particular sense of chronology or relevance. I'm reasonably sure she manages to tie things together by the end of the book, but frankly I do not feel particularly motivated to find out. It is already an interminable slog under a hundred pages into the book (about a quarter of the way through), and I know for a fact there are far better books waiting in my reading list for my attention.

I thought I would give this thing another couple chapters before giving up on it, but then my Significant Other and I started scouring the web for reviews of the five books in the series. I began to get a hint of how this book could seem so much worse than Prisons when we pieced together when these books were written. It turns out that the order in which the author wrote the five books in the quintet was Part 2 (this book), Part 3, Part 1, Part 4, and Part 5. On closer inspection, we found that O Beulah Land was written about seventeen years before Prisons. Seventeen years is a long time. It seems the author, Mary Lee Settle, matured a heckuva lot as an author in those seventeen years.

Adding to my understanding of what I am or am not likely to enjoy about these books is the fact that, looking at the subject matter of the various books, Prisons is an aberration in the series. Parts two through five are about somewhat distant generations of descendants linked to a particular patch of land in the United States southeast, from before the American Revolution up to the twentieth century (though the information about the actual setting and plot of part five of the series, The Killing Ground, is maddenly scant on the Internet -- to the point that I wonder if more than fifty people have ever read that novel). Prisons, meanwhile, is the fictionally very personal perspective of a single "everyman" soldier on the treacherous events central to the final disposition of Cromwell's war against monarchy in seventheenth century England, carrying both a deeply authentic feel for the circumstances of the protagonist and an emerging philosophical understanding of how the dramatic acts of Great Men force troubling weight upon the lives of those unrecognized in our historical records.

In short, where Prisons seems a valuable, thoughtful, impressive work of literary genius, the first quarter of O Beulah Land comes across as a fatuous, self-indulgent exercise in the trite pursuit of writing some stereotypical Great American Novel, falling well short of that mark in large part because of its trite hubris. The fact Prisons appears to have been written as little more than a way to provide some kind of background context, or bookending prelude, to the rest of this seemingly self-conscious attempt to produce an epic generational saga seems to have spared it the overblown feel of O Beulah Land. I rather suspect the third book in the series, itself about thirteen years older than Prisons, would likewise be relatively awful, serving as the final nail in the coffin for my interest in finishing O Beulah Land, because I am uninterested in finishing one bad book just to read another that might aspire to the dizzying heights of mere mediocrity. It is possible the fourth and fifth books are better, but I will not hold my breath, nor read two books that are likely intolerably dull and frustrating to read to get there, and haven't much interest in skipping forty percent of a series just to see if the last forty percent is any good.

Screw it. I have better things to do with my time. I still heartily recommend Prisons, but would warn any curious readers away from O Beulah Land.

[Susan Beecher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fine and beautifully written novel about 1760s through 1770s America prior to the Revolutionary War. Several of the main characters were English who were convicted of minor crimes and sent to the colonies as punishment. Highly recommend this book.

[Vel Veeter]

So imagine the movie The VVitch taking place about a 100 years later, and in western Virginia/border of Ohio territory instead. There’s still lots of fear and anxiety but there’s no witch. Not even a little witch.

This novel comes from a collection of novels by a novelist most (including me until about a year or so ago) from West Virginis named Mary Lee Settle. One of those novelists who spends her entire career at a university, even wins some awards, but maybe doesn’t have the cultural impact of someone much more known.

This novel cycle, and cycle is the right word because they don’t feel quite fully formed novels in terms of plots, follows the loose threads of a family starting during the Cromwell’s rebellion into pre-Revolutionary America, and then beyond. I imagine I will read the others eventually, if not exactly soon.

They’re an interesting historical companion, and the writing is very strong, but this book at least was a bit of a drag. It’s told in dialect, mostly, and the narration is largely atmospheric and impressionistic (more atmosphere luckily) so you feel ensconced in the setting, but there’s not THAT much story. The story itself is about a small set of neighbors and community members looking to incorporate land in what is now West Virginia….or based on the names Virginia and West Virginia.

The appeal for me is that it’s a very Virginia novel, and I have loved those since I was younger. This particular novel is full of family names and place names that are very familiar to me.

Here’s a sample:

” A little dry dust fanned up from the hard-beaten path to Jeremiah Catlett’s cabin. Here it seemed on fine, pounded yellow dirt, there on bare rocks which through the years of scuffing up the path, had been exposed, the ground packed hard around them.

Jeremiah’s dragging left foot no longer quite left the ground when he walked. It made a thin, indented trail in summer dust.”

And so on.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered O BEULAH LAND when my history professor at U.Va., Stephen Innes, assigned it for his Colonial America class. It was the only piece of fiction he assigned, and he said he did so because it illustrated ways of living and thinking and striving in colonial Virginia better than many non-fiction works. He was absolutely right.

I read a great deal of historical fiction, and O BEULAH LAND is one of the best examples of immersing readers fully in another time and place. Settle makes the reader feel at home despite unabashed use of period language and a refusal to sugarcoat unsavory aspects of the past. The reader comes to understand why colonists hungered so deeply for land and were willing to risk so much to push westward despite royal prohibitions, the lack of effective civil governance, and the anger of the Indians on whose land they were encroaching.

To achieve this immersion, she tells parallel and intersecting stories of several settlers representing a wide range of backgrounds and personalities: the French and Indian war veteran seeking to establish himself as a large landowner, his wife and children who may not be prepared for a move to the frontier, an evangelistic backwoodsman and his wife who escaped indentured servitude, a scholar who becomes a frontier printer and schoolmaster.

It isn't the easiest book to dive into at first, but if you give it a chance and want an immersive historical experience, the effort will be well-rewarded.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was one of those books that I kept checking pages numbers to see how many more before the end of the chapter, the end of the part and the end of the book. This is a dead giveaway for a book I am not enjoying all that much. I was not able to connect with any of the characters, but I did like the setting and the descriptions of life in that time.

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book begins with a scene, so powerful -- a woman 'crawling' east over the Appalachias -- that it brought me back to the series after a decades-long hiatus. Now I am reading the rest of the series and find these books among the best historical novels ever written.

[Sharon Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this quintet