I am less than one fourth the way though this book set starting in 1897 and continuing through the the end of the Spanish American war. Already the author, through his charters, has taken me to Alaska for the Yukon gold rush, to Havana to witness the sinking of the USS Maine, to Manila to witness the brutal execution of a Filipino rebel against Spanish rule, and somewhere in the American South to a prison camp where convicts are being used to tap resin from trees. Later he takes the reader back to Manila to see the American fleet destroy the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. I am confused.
In the Alaskan episodes, I learned a lot about the training and corruption of illegal boxing, and various scams to rip off new arrivals hoping to try their luck at gold mining. Here we meet one of the continuing characters, a hard rock miner, turned boxer and general scam artist.
Roughly at the same time as the Alaska episode, but back in the continental United States I am informed about the raising of a regiment of Negro soldiers who are trained on bicyclist with the aim to use them to replace cavalry. Several of soldiers will reappear later in the book.
At least twice I have been taken to Wilmington, North Carolina, where great political upheavals are foreshadowed which I know from reading a review in The New York Review of Books, that will end with the overthrow of the last post-Civil War negro political power in the South. (The two Negro soldiers come from Wilmington.)
What else? Well, I learned a bit about the villainy on the railroads, in encouraging the settlement of the American West by farmers on lands not suited for farming. And a brief flashback to 1894 during a nationwide protest by unemployed and under-employed workers leading some to a protest in Washington D. C., and for the character whose point of view the author is using, a brief arrest somewhere in Montana. Or maybe some nearby state. Since this character is traveling with others on series of stolen trains to get from the West coast to the nation's capital and I got a bit confused by about how far they had come.
I also learned about race riots in Tampa involving white and negro soldiers waiting for transport to fight in Cuba after the start of the war against Spain. In fact I must have read – skipped through – twenty pages plus on Tampa and things that happened there as an army gathered to attack Cuba.
Occasionally real people make appearances. General Nelson Miles who led the final Indian wars is the man behind the experiment with bicycle mounted soldiers. Bat Masterson appears briefly in Colorado as a boxing promoter. The Filipino rebel leader Aguinaldo shows up, first in in exile in Hong Kong, next meeting with the American Admiral after his victory over the Spanish fleet. And US President McKinley shows up in person just long enough to get assassinated. Even the actor Edwin Booth, brother of the Lincoln assassin, makes a brief appearance.
According to an online review in the NY Times, several of these characters will cross paths later in the book. Including the sometimes Alaska boxer, the two negro soldiers, and the viewpoint character of the execution in Manila. The NY Times thinks I should care. So does The New York Review of Books. In fact, just where I stopped reading the Alaskan boxer has been fired from his job in a mine and has joined the army because he has no other choice for work and food. And I just figure out that one of the less important negro soldiers is the man who escaped from that resin tapping chain gang earlier in the book. In fact skipping ahead, I found the miner and two of the important Negro characters fighting in the Philippines.(Where the miner is still throwing boxing matches.) One of the negro soldiers will die there, and the white soldier will decide to marry a local Chinese woman and stay on after the Filipino insurrection is put down by the brutal American occupation. But I had to skip to get there.
I am tired and bored with this book. Do I – do you? - really care about what the state-of-the-art horse-drawn buggies are like in Wilmington in 1898? Well, that's one of longest passages from the second Wilmington episode.
Now I have no doubt that the author, John Sayles, did his research. Even though many of the events he described are little known, I believe they happened. Heck, the stolen train episode can be documented by a quick Internet search. Another three click search confirms the history of the bicycle riding soldiers.
Sayles is an excellent writer using the show me rather than tell me approach. His evocations of fighting between Americans and Filipinos is cruel and accurate as far as I know. With echos of the Vietnam war in it.
But, what I an getting is barely fictionalized historical research, without apparent purpose. Maybe what I am supposed to be learning along the way is that circa 1900 the United States was a harsh land, with many poor people, and some rich and powerful individuals and corporations. With an imperialist agenda.
Some reviewers suggest that Sayles is deliberately pointing to parallels between America then and now. Episodes during in A Moment in the Sun that cover the suppression of the people of the Philippines who hoped for freedom out of our Spanish war, and our 21st century lost opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan are obvious. But it does not require 900 pages to make them clear.
I name several other authors who have dealt with the harsh facts of life in earlier times, while making their chief protagonists sympathetic, while using their lives to portray a rich load of historical information. C. S. Forester and Howard Fast are two who come immediately to mind. Fast was as least as liberal as Sayles, if not more so as a member of the American communist party, but he managed to inject some humanity into his worst characters, even if it is mostly fear and jealously. Something Sayles does not bother to do.
Normally I would reject not write a review of a book I have not completed, but I am making an exception for A Moment in the Sun.
The NY Times review has this to say about John Sayles at the end of its review of his book: “in his respect for facts both documented and extrapolated, he is devoted to offering us a new understanding of the past.”
Well, that is one way of putting it. But I see little new about it, except excruciation details.
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