The Thin Red Line

I honestly can’t recall when I first read Gone With The Wind or saw the movie.    Growing up in the South it seems as though I have always somehow been a fan of Margaret Mitchell’s iconic novel of the Civil War and David O. Selznick’s epic screen adaptation.    Although I, personally, was never at all sure, most women I knew believed with all their hearts  that Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton Butler would win back her husband who so famously "didn’t give a damn" once she went home to Tara and tomorrow turned into "another day."     And after reading Donald McCaig’s extraordinary novel Rhett Butler’s People,  I can say with certainty that those women were right.

Having been quite unimpressed with Alexandra Ripley’s 1991 novel Scarlett, the first instance in which Margaret Mitchell’s estate licensed a living author to revisit Mitchell’s characters and setting,  I initially took little notice of the November 2007 release of Rhett Butler’s People.  But once I got my hands on the book,  I was very pleasantly surprised.    Ms. Ripley was well known as a romance novelist and her Scarlett , billed as a  "sequel" to me read much like her many, many other romances.   Frankly, it’s a genre that has never appealed to me and after perusing the first chapter at a book store,  I found I had no interest at all in reading Ms. Ripley’s book.

By contrast, Donald McCaig is an historical novelist with extensive expertise in the Civil
War period.   And he has written a stunning novel chronicling the life of Rhett Butler, from his troubled youth as the rebellious son of large rice planter in the South  Carolina Low Country to his career as blockade runner in the early years of The War to his tumultuous romance and marriage with Scarlett O’Hara.     While remaining always faithful to both the artistic vision and specific details of Mitchell’s classic novel, McCaig adds greatly to the depth of Rhett Butler’s character and help to make clearer how he came to be the man Scarlett (as well as generations of readers and movie-goers) loved and admired.    Additionally,  Mc Caig is able to provide us with additional detail about the feelings and motivations of the supporting characters such as Melanie and Ashley when they speak or write to people from Rhett’s side of the family who never appeared in Ms. Mitchell’s story.   Melanie’s correspondence with Rhett’s sister Rosemary in particular suffuses her character with much greater depth, sympathy and believability than the ‘too nice to be true’ great Southern lady she came across as in GWTW.

It was at times thrilling to witness from a completely different perspective scenes seen so many times before, such as the interlude at the Wilkes’ barbecue where Scarlett first makes Rhett’s acquaintance,  though McCaig wisely for the most part focuses on other moments and episodes in the chacater’s lives or allows a completely different character to tell part of the tale from a very different point  of view,  as when Melanie relates to Rosemary in a letter her reasons for throwing her sister-in-law India out of her house and protecting Scarlett’s reputation, as well as her husband’s,  when the two were caught in an illicit embrace.   The back cover promotional verbiage bills the novel  as "The other side of the greatest love story ever told".    I call it an exceptional historical novel that is a fitting companion volume (most assuredly Not a sequel Nor a romance novel) to one the great American novels.

If you are even remotely a fan of Gone With The Wind or a Civil War Buff,  Rhett Butler’s People  is Not To Be Missed, An ABSOLUTE MUST READ.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 5:04 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Books, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.