Books: Angry Man's Romance

(5 of 6)

As a story, Oliver Wiswell is one of the best yarns Novelist Roberts has spun. It is packed with people, battles, sudden flights, escapes, rail-riding mobs, secret service, forlorn defenses, intrigue, massacres, exile, and there is the usual restrained Roberts love story. There are also great scenes: the headlong flight by sea of thousands of tory refugees and British troops from Boston; the heroic stupidity of the repeated British frontal attacks at Bunker Hill, seen through tory eyes from Charlestown windows and roof tops.

There is the battle of Long Island, like an old panorama print, with Smallwood's line of brown-clad Marylanders saving the routed American forces. There are weird night scenes in the Long Island swamps where the hunted tories hide, the horrors of life in the British prison hulks; the desperate tory defense of Ninety Six, a Virginia outpost. One of the book's best passages describes the long columns of tories stretching from Winchester (far down the Shenandoah Valley) to the Cumberland Gap. Persecuted by the rebels, let down by the British, the homeless loyalists ooze slowly over Boone's old Wilderness Trail into Kentucky.

Like all Roberts romances, Oliver Wiswell is also important history. Novelist Roberts sees the American Revolution as a social revolution in which the colonial masses, stirred by rabble rousers like Sam Adams and John Hancock, brought the colonies to the brink from which they were later saved by the men who framed the Constitution. This book explains why Americans became tories, why the tories, through they appear to have represented at least half of the population in the 13 colonies, were defeated, why the English were unable to quash the rabble in arms.

Oliver Wiswell is also contemporary. The tragic dilemma of Oliver Wiswell and the tories is a central tragedy of our time. They learn what modern exiles have to learn: 1) that decency, thrift, sobriety, intelligence have no value in a civil war; 2) that there is no hope for the vanquished in a social revolution except to start life over again in a new country. Says Author Roberts through the mouth of troubled Oliver Wiswell: "God grant to all peoples a Wilderness Trail at whose end they can find surcease from demagogues, interference, greed, intolerance and politicians. . . ."

History Repeats. It takes Kenneth Roberts about five years to finish a novel, two of which he spends in research (meanwhile finishing another book). He revises his books five or six times, sometimes makes 200 corrections per page, smokes more & more cotton-tufted Parliament cigarets as he gets going. When a novel is all in, so, as a rule, is Author Roberts.