It is rare for a first novel to be launched with the degree of enthusiasm that Fourth Estate have bestowed upon this saga of the American civil war. The jacket comes trumpeting its triumph on release in the USA. ‘Deserves the Pulitzer Prize’, it quotes from the Toronto Globe and Mail. A cynic might say, on observing that the author holds dual Canadian citizenship, ‘Well, the Toronto Globe and Mail would say that, wouldn’t they?’ But then, so would I. And, what is more, that goes for any other literary prize for which Paulette Jiles is entitled by birth, age or gender, for with Enemy Women she has worked something of a wonder of storytelling.
In the midst of an exceptional meal it is necessary sometimes to put down one’s knife and fork and pause for a moment to consider texture, aroma, flavour and ambience. So it should be with a good tale. I cannot remember the last time I had to close a book so often to stare into the middle distance and consider. Or find myself gasping in surprise. Or, I confess, actually exhorting a character out loud ‘No, don’t!’ Enemy Women may have brought out the child reader in me but with its total lack of sentimentality and its brutal detail, this is no book for children.
Adair Colley is 18 when she and her family are finally sought out in the Ozark mountains of south-eastern Missouri by the seeping fortunes of the civil war, as one mighty army has come south, another north, with proud bands playing. As so often happens to armies with loud bands, in this the third year of the war they have melted away, swallowed up by the terrain and the enemy and in their place have come hyenas and jackals, the militia, the guerrillas and the irregulars, harrying and snapping at the civilians that have survived.
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