Tom Franklin is a Magician: Review of Hell at the Breech
Hell at the Breech, by Tom Franklin, is a story about an event and group of people who actually existed, but whose stories are probably much more interesting in Tom Franklin’s telling.
Tom Franklin is pitch perfect in every regard. I was into the story from the beginning scene, a boy drowning a bag of puppies. It wasn’t as you might expect, overwritten, sappy, etc. It was poetically antiseptic and the perfect introduction to a novel about bad men.
One of the reasons Franklin’s writing is so powerful is that real life has a lot of pain—things that when examined from the comfort of a leather recliner with a blanket on your legs and cup of steaming coffee at your side—don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. These ugly things are parts of our everyday lives, and they baffle and hurt us. Many readers look to fiction to create a womb where they can hide for a short while, and an author’s skill is measured in terms of his or her capacity for sustaining the illusion that all is well and good in the world. A great author in this realm is one who has mastered fluff.
What I love about Tom Franklin’s writing is that you don’t measure his ability to make you more comfortable. Comfort isn’t part of the equation. Comfort is obscenity. His skill is measured by the grace of his words, the depth of emotion they provoke, and the sheer density of original story elements he packs into a novel. Tom Franklin is amazing because he can unmask the stupidity of human action, shine a spotlight into mindless depravity and pain, and you’ll come out of it more enlightened, and somehow, oddly, more convinced that all is right in the world. Tom Franklin is a magician.
I was happy with Hell at the Breech on every single level. The characters are real. The story is told with such a perfect understanding of his readers that Franklin anticipates our every question, our every concern, our every heartbeat, it seems. The middle ratchets up the tension. The end is satisfying in a dozen ways: the violence, the tenderness, the poetic justice, both good and bad, the revelations about story questions infused so deep you almost forgot to ask them. Simply a perfect novel.
If Hell at the Breech somehow never made it onto your reading list, it’s time to go back and pick up a copy.
