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Devil's Dream
From the author of All Souls’ Rising which The Washington Post called “A serious historical novel that reads like a dream,” comes a powerful new novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled, celebrated, and legendary, of Civil War generals.
With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his previous works, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view this complicated American figure. Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small-scale operations.
In Devil's Dream, Bell brings to life an energetic, plainspoken man who does not tolerate weakness in himself or in those around him. We see Forrest on and off the battlefield, in less familiar but no less revealing moments of his courting the woman who would become his wife; battling a compulsion to gamble; overcoming his abhorrence of the army bureaucracy to rise to its highest ranks. We see him treating his slaves humanely even as he fights to ensure their continued enslavement, and in battle we see his knack for keeping his enemy unsettled, his instinct for the unexpected, and his relentless stamina.
As Devil's Dream moves back and forth in time, providing prismatic glimpses of Forrest, a vivid portrait comes into a rough, fierce man with a life fill of contradictions.
With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his previous works, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view this complicated American figure. Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small-scale operations.
In Devil's Dream, Bell brings to life an energetic, plainspoken man who does not tolerate weakness in himself or in those around him. We see Forrest on and off the battlefield, in less familiar but no less revealing moments of his courting the woman who would become his wife; battling a compulsion to gamble; overcoming his abhorrence of the army bureaucracy to rise to its highest ranks. We see him treating his slaves humanely even as he fights to ensure their continued enslavement, and in battle we see his knack for keeping his enemy unsettled, his instinct for the unexpected, and his relentless stamina.
As Devil's Dream moves back and forth in time, providing prismatic glimpses of Forrest, a vivid portrait comes into a rough, fierce man with a life fill of contradictions.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
19 people are currently reading
294 people want to read
About the author
Madison Smartt Bell
57 books174 followersMadison Smartt Bell is a critically acclaimed writer of more than a dozen novels and story collections, as well as numerous essays and reviews for publications such as Harper’s and the New York Times Book Review. His books have been finalists for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, among other honors. Bell has also taught at distinguished creative writing programs including the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Johns Hopkins, and Goucher College. His work is notable for its sweeping historical and philosophical scope matched with a remarkable sensitivity to the individual voices of characters on the margins of society.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
September 10, 2014
After finishing his bloody trilogy on the bloody Haitian Revolution, Madison Smartt Bell turned to the Civil War, specifically the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, an untutored military genius who rose from enlisted man to become the scourge of the Union Army. Many Forrest quotes have survived, and Bell ups the ante, providing the General with vivid language, valiant in defense of his own integrity, full of inventive curses at Union soldiers he intends to kill, orders for his own soldiers, and threats to execute those who desert him. In the troublesome matter of the massacre of black Union soldiers during two battles, Bell chooses -- as he no doubt must, being a modern writer -- to make Forrest a voice of reluctant compassion. And he provides Forrest with other touches that seek to humanize this defender of slavery (and former slave-trader): blacks fight under his orders, he sets aside the whip, and promises to free any slave who fights for the Confederacy. Much of the action is in fact seen through the eyes of Henri, a Haitian freedom fighter who Forrest discovers in Kentucky, and who, despite claiming descent from Toussaint L'Ouverture and to have been at Harper's Ferry, joins the rebels. Here, as elsewhere, Bell strains credulity -- Henri's best rationale for that action is that he gets to watch white men kill each other. Worse is the treatment of the slave Catherine, with whom Bell's Forrest has children. (Like any fictional uneducated Southerner, Forrest is a beast at war but uncomfortable with women). Both at the time of her purchase and during her liaisons with Forrest, Catherine is of all things, seductive and coy. Her hips sway and in general Bell is incapable of providing her with a character beyond come-hither language and movement directed at Forrest, leavened only by the occaisional "yessuh." I have difficulty with any fictional rendition of a woman in which the description of her body and her desire so far exceeds the attempt to give her a mind, an emotional state, a will, a personality. More so here, in the description of a woman legally owned. Bell further glosses over the troubling questions of ownership, racism and coercion (which would not be important to a man of his time like Forrest but that certainly must be addressed for a modern audience) with some modernist trickery in the timeline in the narrative, which shuttles back and forth between antebellum and Civil War scenes with little apparent logic. As a result, Henri even seems to witness events that occur after his death. When characters appear in scenes, their future deaths are sometimes noted. Perhaps a straightforward chronology does not suit Bell's purposes, but the staggering framework that he imposes does not reveal what they might be. All that said, the language is picturesque and occasionally moving, even if it sometimes reads like the lists of the killing of warriors in the Iliad, the characters generally come alive, even the inexplicable Henri, including Forrest's wife and mother, and especially the General himself. I perhaps should recuse myself from Confederate literature; despite having lived in the South for many years, I find the beginnings of the Civil War as inexplicable as those of the First World War. For all the fiery talk, the North was not demonstrably moving toward complete abolition -- it took three years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and the Union Army was so unprepared for ending slavery that it took the lawyer Gen. Butler to figure out how to handle deserting slaves. I am immune, too, to the development of the nostalgia industry for the southern cause. The early, and to my mind best, literature of the conflict was blue: Melville, Whitman, Crane, of course, and the memoirs of Generals Grant and Sherman. Perhaps the initiative turns with the cinema, and D.W. Griffith's repulsive images of Reconstruction and the Klan, with Faulkner's ambivalence, with "Gone with the Wind" and the plantation myth. But myth it all is, from Griffith to Bell, and "Devil's Dream" stands somewhat uneasily in that tradition. Because it lost on the battlefield, the South sought redress through economic and social restriction, political obstruction, and a literary nostalgia that finds glory on the cruelty of the blood-soaked battlefield.
Specifically referencing "Devil's Dream" surely I am not alone in noting that when at last, in the final scene, Bell's Forrest laments the waste of the war and wonders what it was all for, the proximate cause of this meditation that comes far too late is not the danger to his sons (one of them a product of yet another liaison with a slave) or the death of his inexplicably loyal Haitian, but the loss of yet another horse. This is a lack of vision for which only makes me think of any number of remedies: Gabriel Chevalier's "Fear" or Wilfred Owen's poems from World War I, Michael Herr's "Dispatches", even "The Yellow Birds." I can only close with Owen: "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,...
Specifically referencing "Devil's Dream" surely I am not alone in noting that when at last, in the final scene, Bell's Forrest laments the waste of the war and wonders what it was all for, the proximate cause of this meditation that comes far too late is not the danger to his sons (one of them a product of yet another liaison with a slave) or the death of his inexplicably loyal Haitian, but the loss of yet another horse. This is a lack of vision for which only makes me think of any number of remedies: Gabriel Chevalier's "Fear" or Wilfred Owen's poems from World War I, Michael Herr's "Dispatches", even "The Yellow Birds." I can only close with Owen: "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,...
July 13, 2020
I can’t even describe how much I dislike this book. I picked it up thinking it would be a biography, but BAM it’s historical fanfic about a confederate general, written from a mystical black person’s perspective off and on. It gratuitously uses the n-word, glorifies Nathan Bedford Forrest (who went on the lead the KKK, which is only mentioned in the timeline at the end of the book), and portrays his many children begotten on one of his slave women as a consensual relationship or, worse, that he is powerless to her seductive charms. I was struggling to get through this just because of how gross it made me feel to read. Also, the chronological bouncing around only confused the plot; it didn’t add anything to the story.
To be fair, the conceit of the book is fairly interesting, and the end twist was well done.
To be fair, the conceit of the book is fairly interesting, and the end twist was well done.
December 26, 2009
Bound Miami SunPost November 26, 2009
http://miamisunpost.com/themorgue/200...
Madman o’ War
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Fight to the Death
John Hood
For a slave trader, General Nathan Bedford Forrest sure seemed to dig blacks. He took one as a mistress, fathered at least a few, and rode side-by-side with a loyal contingent of black soldiers and teamsters throughout the Civil War. One of those soldiers was even his son.
This being the South however, Forrest never owned up to the fact that the lad was his own blood. But on occasion he did show some kind of empathy. Just as Forrest showed a tinge of compassion when he discovered that one of his slaves had been separated from his wife. After the War though, Forrest did what every self-respecting bigot slave trader did – he joined the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact Forrest was the Klan’s first Grand Wizard. And therein lies some of the rub behind Madison Smart Bell’s battle-scarred hymn of a novel, Devil’s Dream (Pantheon $26). The General had some very ugly qualities. But if you forget the fact that Forrest would rise to an exalted place among white supremacists (and until the Chronology at Devil’s end, Bell does), and if you set aside the slave-trading (though with War raging over just that, it’s kinda hard to), you’ll find one of the most compelling figures in American military history – and a damn colorful creation to boot.
And Bell, who’s been at this game for more than a quarter century, knows that to paint such a figure as this you’re gonna need a lotta nuance and more than a few bold masterstrokes. And his Dream is revealed with just the right amount of both.
Forrest was a millionaire plantation owner when the War broke out. And he’s one of the few fighters on either side of the fight who’d rise from private to general. Unschooled, Forrest didn’t bring to the battlefield any of the book-learned biases the West Point grads relied upon, many to their great dismay. And that not only gave him an edge, it earned him their wrath as well.
Indeed Robert E. Lee called him “the Devil himself,” and Benjamin Bragg, with whom Forrest would quarrel throughout the War’s four years, constantly undermanned his authority and counter-manned his battle plans. And if Bell’s fictional portrayals have about them any ring of truth (and there’s no reason to see why they wouldn’t), had the Confederate hierarchy allowed Forrest to wage war his way there may have been a very different outcome.
Dream’s countless battle scenes are brutal and barbaric enough to rival The 300, and oftentimes written just as vividly. Fields are littered with corpses, rivers run red with blood, and through it all Forrest gallops like a man possessed. And when he gets that certain rage in his eye, no one or no thing can stand in his way.
Naturally a madman can’t be relied upon to keep a story straight, so the tall tale is tended to by a Haitian warrior named Henri, who rode with John Brown’s Raiders and had it in mind to raise the slaves into some kind of organized revolt. Unfortunately, all but a very few slaves would be raised to do anything other than flee, and this Henri ends-up on the wrong side of some vigilantes. When Forrest finds him on the side of the road, he’s just happy to have someone to ride with. And though Henri’s loathe to be beside a slave trader, he’s got no kick against watching white folks kill each other.
Henri, who Forrest calls “Ornery” when he’s feeling particularly playful, is a sort of spiritual son of Toussaint L’Ouverture, subject of Bell’s last book. And after the free man takes a bullet in Chickamauga, he doesn’t so much as fight alongside Forrest and the Confederates as ride astride the company, half in and half out of the real world, and in near constant communication with the Old Ones.
If Forrest is this book’s body, it’s Henri who gives Devil’s Dream its soul. Bell, who undoubtedly learned a thing or two about spirits while writing the Haitian Trilogy which preceded his Toussaint Louverture (all four books are available from Vintage), reaches back into the African motherland and doses the whole tale with a good bit of juju. And it’s that etherealness which keeps Dream from being nothing but a damn good war story.
It also adds some balance to what could have very well been a heavily weighted equation. Like I said, Forrest had some very ugly qualities. Yet he was also a mad, bad and very dangerous cat. It’s that latter historical figure which gets its due here, and it’s that madman o’ war who deserves this homage.
http://miamisunpost.com/themorgue/200...
Madman o’ War
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Fight to the Death
John Hood
For a slave trader, General Nathan Bedford Forrest sure seemed to dig blacks. He took one as a mistress, fathered at least a few, and rode side-by-side with a loyal contingent of black soldiers and teamsters throughout the Civil War. One of those soldiers was even his son.
This being the South however, Forrest never owned up to the fact that the lad was his own blood. But on occasion he did show some kind of empathy. Just as Forrest showed a tinge of compassion when he discovered that one of his slaves had been separated from his wife. After the War though, Forrest did what every self-respecting bigot slave trader did – he joined the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact Forrest was the Klan’s first Grand Wizard. And therein lies some of the rub behind Madison Smart Bell’s battle-scarred hymn of a novel, Devil’s Dream (Pantheon $26). The General had some very ugly qualities. But if you forget the fact that Forrest would rise to an exalted place among white supremacists (and until the Chronology at Devil’s end, Bell does), and if you set aside the slave-trading (though with War raging over just that, it’s kinda hard to), you’ll find one of the most compelling figures in American military history – and a damn colorful creation to boot.
And Bell, who’s been at this game for more than a quarter century, knows that to paint such a figure as this you’re gonna need a lotta nuance and more than a few bold masterstrokes. And his Dream is revealed with just the right amount of both.
Forrest was a millionaire plantation owner when the War broke out. And he’s one of the few fighters on either side of the fight who’d rise from private to general. Unschooled, Forrest didn’t bring to the battlefield any of the book-learned biases the West Point grads relied upon, many to their great dismay. And that not only gave him an edge, it earned him their wrath as well.
Indeed Robert E. Lee called him “the Devil himself,” and Benjamin Bragg, with whom Forrest would quarrel throughout the War’s four years, constantly undermanned his authority and counter-manned his battle plans. And if Bell’s fictional portrayals have about them any ring of truth (and there’s no reason to see why they wouldn’t), had the Confederate hierarchy allowed Forrest to wage war his way there may have been a very different outcome.
Dream’s countless battle scenes are brutal and barbaric enough to rival The 300, and oftentimes written just as vividly. Fields are littered with corpses, rivers run red with blood, and through it all Forrest gallops like a man possessed. And when he gets that certain rage in his eye, no one or no thing can stand in his way.
Naturally a madman can’t be relied upon to keep a story straight, so the tall tale is tended to by a Haitian warrior named Henri, who rode with John Brown’s Raiders and had it in mind to raise the slaves into some kind of organized revolt. Unfortunately, all but a very few slaves would be raised to do anything other than flee, and this Henri ends-up on the wrong side of some vigilantes. When Forrest finds him on the side of the road, he’s just happy to have someone to ride with. And though Henri’s loathe to be beside a slave trader, he’s got no kick against watching white folks kill each other.
Henri, who Forrest calls “Ornery” when he’s feeling particularly playful, is a sort of spiritual son of Toussaint L’Ouverture, subject of Bell’s last book. And after the free man takes a bullet in Chickamauga, he doesn’t so much as fight alongside Forrest and the Confederates as ride astride the company, half in and half out of the real world, and in near constant communication with the Old Ones.
If Forrest is this book’s body, it’s Henri who gives Devil’s Dream its soul. Bell, who undoubtedly learned a thing or two about spirits while writing the Haitian Trilogy which preceded his Toussaint Louverture (all four books are available from Vintage), reaches back into the African motherland and doses the whole tale with a good bit of juju. And it’s that etherealness which keeps Dream from being nothing but a damn good war story.
It also adds some balance to what could have very well been a heavily weighted equation. Like I said, Forrest had some very ugly qualities. Yet he was also a mad, bad and very dangerous cat. It’s that latter historical figure which gets its due here, and it’s that madman o’ war who deserves this homage.
October 21, 2014
There is no doubt that Madison Smartt Bell can write a first-rate novel; however, in this one, a historical-based biographical tale of Nathan Bedford Forrest, he seems to gloss over, or maybe a better word is minimalize, the darker sides of this southern slave trader who became a confederate general, and after the war, went on to be a grand master of the Ku Klux Klan.
The personality of Henri, the book’s Haitian, free-born black confederate cavalryman is the book’s gem. What a great character – always true to himself and others, a fount of knowledge and experience, and the vessel of magic brought over from his native country. The book is worth reading just to follow Henri’s mystic journey. This leads me to think that the books Mr. Bell has crafted on Haiti’s violent history are probably also well worth checking out.
The personality of Henri, the book’s Haitian, free-born black confederate cavalryman is the book’s gem. What a great character – always true to himself and others, a fount of knowledge and experience, and the vessel of magic brought over from his native country. The book is worth reading just to follow Henri’s mystic journey. This leads me to think that the books Mr. Bell has crafted on Haiti’s violent history are probably also well worth checking out.
February 1, 2011
Lovely writing. He played with the chronology as a way to structure the book. (Think of The God of Small Things.) As a writer, I'm intrigued when I come across this, but at the end of the book, I'm usually left wondering what was gained by not telling it straight-forwardly. If he'd given Henri the last chapter, Henri after Chickamauga that is, it would have worked. But four stars--how bad can that be? Highly recommended.
August 26, 2010
A non-linear historical fiction novel, with a narrator who is in the story and somehow knows the future.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most interesting individuals in the war so I appreciate the history aspect of the book (but I am somewhat of a civil war nut). However the general style and non-linearness of the story detracts and confuses the reader and adds nothing.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most interesting individuals in the war so I appreciate the history aspect of the book (but I am somewhat of a civil war nut). However the general style and non-linearness of the story detracts and confuses the reader and adds nothing.
July 27, 2011
Interesting book. A fictionalized biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Often told from the viewpoint of a Haitian fighting in his army. I think it would have been a lot better id it had been delivered chronologically, though.
July 11, 2019
Finding the center of his line broken in April 1862 by Nathan Bedford Forrest – who is alone, wounded, armed only with a pistol and a foot-long knife, but furiously killing Union soldiers left and right – General William Tecumseh Sherman howls at his troops: “Will no one kill that madman?” (p88). No one ever managed it. (Forrest died during Reconstruction at age 56 of diabetes.) A tough, crude, ferocious former slave-trader, Forrest was equally loathed and revered, but he was the most intuitively brilliant of Civil War cavalry commanders. (Forrest volunteered as a private and ended the war a lieutenant general.) Unlike the self-promoting Confederate cavalryman J.E.B. Stuart (West Point Class of 1854), Forrest was unschooled in military science but relied on pit-bull aggressiveness, surprise and flawless reading of the battlefield. Many of his maxims have a permanent place in both folklore and tactical thinking (“Hit ‘em where they ain’t”... “Get there first with the most”). From the very start, Forrest fought the best of the Union Army’s generals, often outnumbered two or three to one – and he gave them all fits. A running joke in DEVIL’S DREAM has Forrest asking defeated Federal officers if maybe they could tell him how they were instructed at West Point to “git whupped” so he could beat ‘em the way they had been taught.
An able novelist may be exactly what is needed to humanize a historical figure as reviled, feared (and dubiously celebrated) as Forrest. Madison Smartt Bell makes it clear that Forrest went through life the way he rode into battle – he “surrendered to an uncomfortable force that utterly filled him as it flung him forward” (p167). In fact, the main recommendation of his own character that Forrest offers in Aug. 1845 to his future wife’s guardian is: “I ain’t halfway yet to whar I’m a-goen” (p18).
Most of the perspective on Forrest comes from a mysterious French-speaking young recruit/conscript named Henri, who is tagged “Ornery” by the mush-mouthed Forrest. Henri sometimes reels from visions given him by “the Old Ones,” when he falls into the future through “windows” in his mind. Like Nick Carraway in THE GREAT GATSBY, Henri is a true witness. Although he has “the sight” (precognition), Henri tells Forrest’s wife that he “can’t control anything. All I can do is watch” (p203). DEVIL’S DREAM moves back and forth in time, anyway, and it seems to Mister Liberryhead an unnecessary, needlessly confusing device – which the author may have suspected himself, because he includes a straightforward chronology of Forrest’s life at the back. (I’m still trying to work out Henri’s timeline in the novel.) Foreign-born and free, copper-skinned but regularly labeled with the “N-word,” Henri walks a razor-thin racial line in the Confederate Army. Race relations are further explored through a subplot about the touchy, competitive relationship between two of Forrest’s sons – one white, the other “caramel-color” (p172) – hence, one son acknowledged and free, the other a bastard and a slave. Regardless, everybody follows Forrest into the maelstrom.
An able novelist may be exactly what is needed to humanize a historical figure as reviled, feared (and dubiously celebrated) as Forrest. Madison Smartt Bell makes it clear that Forrest went through life the way he rode into battle – he “surrendered to an uncomfortable force that utterly filled him as it flung him forward” (p167). In fact, the main recommendation of his own character that Forrest offers in Aug. 1845 to his future wife’s guardian is: “I ain’t halfway yet to whar I’m a-goen” (p18).
Most of the perspective on Forrest comes from a mysterious French-speaking young recruit/conscript named Henri, who is tagged “Ornery” by the mush-mouthed Forrest. Henri sometimes reels from visions given him by “the Old Ones,” when he falls into the future through “windows” in his mind. Like Nick Carraway in THE GREAT GATSBY, Henri is a true witness. Although he has “the sight” (precognition), Henri tells Forrest’s wife that he “can’t control anything. All I can do is watch” (p203). DEVIL’S DREAM moves back and forth in time, anyway, and it seems to Mister Liberryhead an unnecessary, needlessly confusing device – which the author may have suspected himself, because he includes a straightforward chronology of Forrest’s life at the back. (I’m still trying to work out Henri’s timeline in the novel.) Foreign-born and free, copper-skinned but regularly labeled with the “N-word,” Henri walks a razor-thin racial line in the Confederate Army. Race relations are further explored through a subplot about the touchy, competitive relationship between two of Forrest’s sons – one white, the other “caramel-color” (p172) – hence, one son acknowledged and free, the other a bastard and a slave. Regardless, everybody follows Forrest into the maelstrom.
July 26, 2020
Larger Than Life War Hero
This is a well-told tale, presented non-chronologically from his youth to the end of the Civil War. Having had 29 horses killed beneath him and killed 30 enemy soldiers himself in close combat, wounded several times himself, N. B. Forrest is a larger than life Southern Legend. Bell renders him human, the good and the bad - Forrest was also a slave trader before the war, though he freed most of the ones he owned by war’s end. He was a brilliant strategist and tactician, but an impossible subordinate.
But for me there are issues with the book. A bit jarringly for even my southern ears, Bell phoneticizes Forrest’s Tennessean speech, but I grew used to this. Bell also brings in his knowledge of the Haitian revolution via supernatural aspects of a volunteer in Forrest’s command. This was puzzling and distracting at first, but ultimately proved a good lens through which to view Forrests’s complex relationships with Negroes. Some reviewers have complained about the broken chronology, but I think they are just used to linear nonfiction; I had no issues accessing this book. The writing is well-crafted and immersive. But one wishes perhaps to have less glorious battle and more exploration of Forrest’s interesting postwar years: KKK leader turned racial assimilationist, failed businessman trying to navigate a war-shredded region during Reconstruction, supposed conversion to the Christianity he condemned much of his life.
This is mostly just a good, male war tale: heroic charges with guns and swords, fleeting female character development, all enhanced by complex moral consideration. Taken as that, the book succeeds and I will someday read it again. 4.5 stars.
This is a well-told tale, presented non-chronologically from his youth to the end of the Civil War. Having had 29 horses killed beneath him and killed 30 enemy soldiers himself in close combat, wounded several times himself, N. B. Forrest is a larger than life Southern Legend. Bell renders him human, the good and the bad - Forrest was also a slave trader before the war, though he freed most of the ones he owned by war’s end. He was a brilliant strategist and tactician, but an impossible subordinate.
But for me there are issues with the book. A bit jarringly for even my southern ears, Bell phoneticizes Forrest’s Tennessean speech, but I grew used to this. Bell also brings in his knowledge of the Haitian revolution via supernatural aspects of a volunteer in Forrest’s command. This was puzzling and distracting at first, but ultimately proved a good lens through which to view Forrests’s complex relationships with Negroes. Some reviewers have complained about the broken chronology, but I think they are just used to linear nonfiction; I had no issues accessing this book. The writing is well-crafted and immersive. But one wishes perhaps to have less glorious battle and more exploration of Forrest’s interesting postwar years: KKK leader turned racial assimilationist, failed businessman trying to navigate a war-shredded region during Reconstruction, supposed conversion to the Christianity he condemned much of his life.
This is mostly just a good, male war tale: heroic charges with guns and swords, fleeting female character development, all enhanced by complex moral consideration. Taken as that, the book succeeds and I will someday read it again. 4.5 stars.
December 31, 2017
This fictionalized account of General Bedford Forrest, slave owner, Confederate soldier and leader in the American Civil War, was a fair but generally disjointed account of the life of a heroic but conflicted man of his time.
I actually found the brief chronological account of this man's life at the end of the novel more interesting and informative than the main novel.
It is clear that Bell had accumulated a massive amount of research about Forrest, including his life before, during and after the war, but then struggled to present it in a coherent narrative. The structure of the novel was frustrating, jumping around in time to no apparent benefit. Bell tried to include as many factual anecdotes about minor incidents as he could, but they often didn't really add to the drama of the story.
Having read in the appendix of Forrest's life after the war, his role in the Ku Klux Klan and his business endeavours in railroad building etc., I would have preferred to have had more of this man in the story and the less of descriptions of war skirmishes and the number of horses that Forrest had shot from under him.
Just a fair attempt, full of missed opportunities to better understand a complex and potentially fascinating character.
I actually found the brief chronological account of this man's life at the end of the novel more interesting and informative than the main novel.
It is clear that Bell had accumulated a massive amount of research about Forrest, including his life before, during and after the war, but then struggled to present it in a coherent narrative. The structure of the novel was frustrating, jumping around in time to no apparent benefit. Bell tried to include as many factual anecdotes about minor incidents as he could, but they often didn't really add to the drama of the story.
Having read in the appendix of Forrest's life after the war, his role in the Ku Klux Klan and his business endeavours in railroad building etc., I would have preferred to have had more of this man in the story and the less of descriptions of war skirmishes and the number of horses that Forrest had shot from under him.
Just a fair attempt, full of missed opportunities to better understand a complex and potentially fascinating character.
January 28, 2020
I found this book tremendously disappointing. I was interested in the subject matter -- the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and certain characters who were black men fighting with him for the south. But the story went nowhere and that seemed intentional. Chapter to chapter (and there were many chapters -- 40 in a 300-page book) featured a timeline jump. That can be effective but here it was not, in part because the time period itself was very narrow (maybe 10 years, max). So there was no story arc and the vignettes from particular times just faded into each other without much distinction -- jumps from September 1863 to January 1861 to February 1865, etc etc. It just crippled the plot and character development.
October 27, 2018
Interesting biographical fiction placed during the Civil War focused on the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. I'm not too keen on stories that jump around in time, but at least the chapters were dated. Well researched and documented with Gen. Forrest's life chronology, the story also featured a Black man named Henri whom Forrest called "Ornery." Henri was a free man who was picked up on the side of the rode by Forrest and his troops, who is said to have the "sight," and who interjects a somewhat paranormal alternate story. Worth the read for Civil War enthusiasts.
October 27, 2018
I enjoyed reading this novel for the history it tells even though much of it must be created in the author's imagination. Bell switches back and forth in time to such an extent that I was disturbed at first but finally settled to just taking each time flip as a separate, mostly unconnected episode. There really was no plot that I could discern other than the overall civil war. I really couldn't recommend this book either for its history or entertainment.
October 5, 2022
I have to confess that this is one of the very few books I decided to stop reading before finishing. Despite loving the Haitian trilogy I found myself wondering why I should care about a homicidal traitor, so I stopped just as the Fort Pillow massacre was about to start. There are plenty of other books to read, and though I’m not adverse to being discomforted by a book I just couldn’t sustain my interest with this one. What I did read was well written, as one would expect.
Want to read
July 19, 2020elibrary
September 8, 2021
Couldn't give it zero stars but wanted to... DNF
April 14, 2024
I like this author's style but I wish the book had been written chronologically. It was a good civil war account from an unusual perspective. A map would have been a huge help.
October 9, 2012
This the fourth book by Madison Smartt Bell that I have read. I previously read his Haitian war trilogy, so this book following those made it a tough act to follow. Smartt Bell is from Tennessee he knows his state history and the people who made it.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the heroes of the Confederacy. Rough-hewn, uncouth, racist and in a strange way fair to his slaves. He was a man of his time. Bedford Forrest was a fearless warrior whose war time exploits won him many admirers and detractors among military leaders in both the Confederacy and Union armies.
He was the lead tactician of his own strategies while following and complaining about those of immediate superiors, principally General Bragg,
The exploits of Bedford Forrest and his army are told through the eyes of Black freedman name Henri, whose main reason for being in Tennessee is the hope of raising a slave rebellion similar to one the in Haiti. Henri is allowed to join Forrest's troops because he is free. Forrest doesn't know his motives and male slaves who want to be free had to volunteer as teamsters. This does nothing for female slaves.
In this devil of a dream, Forrest was a murder, not necessarily in wartime; unfaithful to his wife; a gambler. He is the Civil War version of a Navy Seal Team 6 commander. Fearless almost to fault, there were battles that the Confederates may have won had the commanding officers listened to Forrest. But this is America. Class during those times was only third to race, gender and class. Bedford Forrest lacked the third.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the heroes of the Confederacy. Rough-hewn, uncouth, racist and in a strange way fair to his slaves. He was a man of his time. Bedford Forrest was a fearless warrior whose war time exploits won him many admirers and detractors among military leaders in both the Confederacy and Union armies.
He was the lead tactician of his own strategies while following and complaining about those of immediate superiors, principally General Bragg,
The exploits of Bedford Forrest and his army are told through the eyes of Black freedman name Henri, whose main reason for being in Tennessee is the hope of raising a slave rebellion similar to one the in Haiti. Henri is allowed to join Forrest's troops because he is free. Forrest doesn't know his motives and male slaves who want to be free had to volunteer as teamsters. This does nothing for female slaves.
In this devil of a dream, Forrest was a murder, not necessarily in wartime; unfaithful to his wife; a gambler. He is the Civil War version of a Navy Seal Team 6 commander. Fearless almost to fault, there were battles that the Confederates may have won had the commanding officers listened to Forrest. But this is America. Class during those times was only third to race, gender and class. Bedford Forrest lacked the third.
June 1, 2011
I hadn't heard of Nathan Bedford Forrest before reading this book. Apparently he was one heck of a guy. This novelization of his life is in general very well written and I enjoyed reading it. However, it definitely wasn't the best novel I've read.
Of the characters, Forrest is probably the most interesting, which I suppose makes sense since the author picked him to write a novel about. However, either due to the narration or what have you, the rest of the characters around Forrest were rather flat, with a few exceptions, as if just there to fill a part in telling the story of Forrest's life. Maybe I'm expecting too much, though, as this is only the second book I've ever read that is a novelization of a historical person's life; maybe in the genre it generally is more about retelling the person's story rather than building the world around him/her.
In other things, the narration was mostly from the point of view of Henri, who frequently referred to things that were going to happen, which never really had any explanation. Maybe it's just something that Haitians usually can do? Additionally, the story jumped between years and parts of Forrest's life a little excessively in my opinion, with no apparently narrative purpose. It was generally easy enough to figure out where the story was (most of the chapters had months/years, which might help) in broad terms, but as far as specifics of the order of the chapters, it wasn't obvious for me.
Of the characters, Forrest is probably the most interesting, which I suppose makes sense since the author picked him to write a novel about. However, either due to the narration or what have you, the rest of the characters around Forrest were rather flat, with a few exceptions, as if just there to fill a part in telling the story of Forrest's life. Maybe I'm expecting too much, though, as this is only the second book I've ever read that is a novelization of a historical person's life; maybe in the genre it generally is more about retelling the person's story rather than building the world around him/her.
In other things, the narration was mostly from the point of view of Henri, who frequently referred to things that were going to happen, which never really had any explanation. Maybe it's just something that Haitians usually can do? Additionally, the story jumped between years and parts of Forrest's life a little excessively in my opinion, with no apparently narrative purpose. It was generally easy enough to figure out where the story was (most of the chapters had months/years, which might help) in broad terms, but as far as specifics of the order of the chapters, it wasn't obvious for me.
March 25, 2010
nathan bedford forest joined the confederate army as a private and was a major general four years later at the end of the civil war. he was an amazingly complex man. roughly educated, brutally blunt, a dealer in slaves, and an unmatched leader of men, he is by far one of the most unique induviduals produced by the 19th century.
he was reviled and despised by most of the officers in the confederacy, because of his lack of gentility and poor education, but he out-generaled them at every turn. he had 29 horses shot out from under him (leading him to remark that he was a horse ahead when the war ended). he received numerous wounds by gun and saber, some life threatening, yet seemed to rise miraculously from his bed, refusing to be bested. it's no wonder his men worshiped him. he literally led them into battle, and won battles with an army sometimes half as large as the one he went against.
some historians have said that the civil war produced two brillisnt men, abraham lincoln and nathan bedford forest. this novel captures both his simplicity and his genius beautifully, and does a bang up job of recreating some of the most original and colorful cursing that you have ever heard. I can't stop wondering what a man of his character and sense of honor would do in our world today.
he was reviled and despised by most of the officers in the confederacy, because of his lack of gentility and poor education, but he out-generaled them at every turn. he had 29 horses shot out from under him (leading him to remark that he was a horse ahead when the war ended). he received numerous wounds by gun and saber, some life threatening, yet seemed to rise miraculously from his bed, refusing to be bested. it's no wonder his men worshiped him. he literally led them into battle, and won battles with an army sometimes half as large as the one he went against.
some historians have said that the civil war produced two brillisnt men, abraham lincoln and nathan bedford forest. this novel captures both his simplicity and his genius beautifully, and does a bang up job of recreating some of the most original and colorful cursing that you have ever heard. I can't stop wondering what a man of his character and sense of honor would do in our world today.
June 13, 2011
When I was little boy I used to meet my grandmother for lunch at Forrest Park in Memphis, TN. In the middle of the park there was a statue of a man on a horse and we would eat our lunch beside the statue. The man, of course, was Nathan Bedford Forrest. Years later, as I began to learn about warfare, I learned that Forrest was feared by many as a guerrilla fighter during a war mostly fought face to face over pieces of terrain. As a Marine my curiosity about the man grew. Still later I began to hear that he had been a slave trader and was affiliated with the KKK, perhaps in charge of it after the war. The reviews about his treatment of slaves were mixed.
Is is tempting to try to write a biography of him here, but it occurs to me that Madison Smartt Bell has already done a fine job of that. The book is not sequential - it jumps around in time. I think I heard in college that skipping around in time is a breach of some basic principle of writing, but Bell has earned the right to ignore college writing principles. The effect is that it reads like a collection of short stories and I love short stories. These stories as you read on begin to collect as a picture of the man, probably much better than a chronological account would have. And the picture is a very interesting man during an intense period of history. I recommend to anyone.
Is is tempting to try to write a biography of him here, but it occurs to me that Madison Smartt Bell has already done a fine job of that. The book is not sequential - it jumps around in time. I think I heard in college that skipping around in time is a breach of some basic principle of writing, but Bell has earned the right to ignore college writing principles. The effect is that it reads like a collection of short stories and I love short stories. These stories as you read on begin to collect as a picture of the man, probably much better than a chronological account would have. And the picture is a very interesting man during an intense period of history. I recommend to anyone.
May 21, 2010
Sure, he started the KKK, traded slaves for a living before the Civil War, and commanded the South's most lethal and feared cavalry unit. But Nathan Bedford Forrest was much more than all that, a complex person whose life illuminates events around the Civil War, the most critical period in America's history. Madison Bell is a skilled writer whose well-written and interesting novels offer many insights into the historical periods he writes about, and "Devil's Dream"--his second novel titled after a traditional fiddle tune--does not disappoint.
September 4, 2014
The narrative, often seen through the eyes of Henri, a Haitian complement to Forrest in some ways, unfolds the story of Forrest in the context of Civil War battles most are familiar with, but uses stories from his past to help the reader glimpse the character of the man that commanded the loyalty of so many, white and black. At one point in the novel, the author has Forrest pass on a thought to his black son that is, I think, revealing - that the only thing one truly owns are the choices he has made and how he has carried out those choices.
December 14, 2017
I found this book a bit difficult to follow. It jumped back and forth between the observations of Henri, a Haitian born man who gets recruited by Nathan Bedford Forrest, and general 3rd person omniscient following Nathan Bedford Forrest, but the chronology is very back and forth, and the parts with Henri is even stranger because he has “the sight” and doesn’t see things chronologically either, so there’s a whole lot of “has this happened yet or not” going on, which I don’t particularly like.
Now if you like that writing style, it’s pretty good if you like books set during the Civil War.
Now if you like that writing style, it’s pretty good if you like books set during the Civil War.
January 31, 2013
This book is "Cold Mountain" with balls. An unapologetic look at Forrest, warts and all. Not only captures the flavor of the period, but have to applaud Smartt Bell for not making the obvious 21st century judgements on the man. Without all that anachronistic political correctness to get in the way, Smartt Bell let's us get swept up in the period. The dialogue is terrific. Eager to dive into his Haiti trilogy now.
March 27, 2010
My first book by this author and it won't be my last. Highly engaging "fictional" biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest who could have won the Civil War if the powers in charge had used him effectively. Worth your while to look at this.
December 14, 2010
Eh, the magical realism throughout is pretty interesting, plus the chapters are arranged out of chronological order. It gives it a "mystic chords of memory" feel, but—but—one of the main plot points is NBF's recruitment of slaves into his company to fight against the Union.
Want to read
May 19, 2010Fictional biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
January 1, 2014
This is a book about Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest. The author took liberties with quotes but made me feel like I was there. This was a very interesting and well-written book.
February 11, 2013
I would love to be able to say more than 'terrible,' but that's all I can muster.
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