John Sayles is on a roll with this new historical novel, his third in as many years following the enjoyable and enlightening To Save the Man and Jamie MacGillivray. It’s an impressive work rate when you consider the research involved in such projects.
Sayles has been one of the great independent filmmakers in American cinema (Matewan and Lone Star are modern masterpieces), and it’s easy to understand why he has turned to the novel when tackling such rich historic stories, great as their potential for his film direction might be.
Powering on a laptop and hitting the archives must have an easier budget to manage than chasing finance from power brokers in an industry saturated with big-bang blockbusters. Sayles, like his characters in Matewan, has always determined his own path, and what fascinating footsteps he follows in Crucible.
It’s a sprawling story set in the 1920s across Detroit, Brazil and Dearborn, Michigan; the latter the estate of Henry Ford, Sayles’s focal point in examining a version of the American dream abstracted through a hyper-capitalist production line. The author’s output is a vast cast of colourful characters, some good, some bad, and, as you’d expect from a scriptwriter, the dialogue is superb and rings true of its age.
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Crucible is a large book at 500 pages, but it moves swiftly with Sayles’s cinematic talent for setting scenes quickly before cutting to the next one, always driving the narrative forward in his stripped-back style.
It’s an engrossing epic tale of an unhinged American plutocrat with odious views on society; US imperialism in South America to exploit its natural resources; oppression of the masses by the few, and public protests being met with establishment violence; enforcement of unworkable laws and insidious political machinations; tense race relations in a multicultural society suffering the strains of being whipped into a frenzy by a shameless elite with vested interests; masses of jobs being threatened by vast technological leaps, and social experiments in human behaviour being carried out by egotistical parvenus. A fine “historical” story, indeed.
As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”
NJ McGarrigle is a freelance writer based in Co Derry
