Rebecca Ore: Slow Funeral / Sharyn McCrumb: The Songcatcher

This review first ran on Green Man Review.

I’ll be looking at two novels set in the Appalachian Highlands: Sharyn McCrumb’s latest Ballad novel, The Songcatcher and Rebecca Ore’s Slow Funeral. Both authors make use of their common setting in ways that will surprise you!

No, Slow Funeral did not get lost in my reviewing pile — a pile now just small enough that our two newest kittens, Robin of Sherwood and Maid Marian, aren’t in mortal danger from getting caught in a catquake that might bring down the pile! (Don’t laugh: this pile was once large enough that a fifth of Glenmorangie whisky got hidden for months! And that was a damn shame as this is verra fine sippin’ whisky!) No, it’s been in our library for some time now and me thought was that it should be reviewed. Slow Funeral is one of those midsummer novels that one reads to invoke the feel of the Appalachian Highlands, where the magic and mystery are as real as the bittersweet taste of rhubarb fresh from the garden, or the sound of a murder of crows gathering overhead during a funeral. This is not the clean, neatly packaged magic of the modern Witches, but the old, deep,and often dark magic that is old as the Hills themselves — or perhaps even much older.

Rebecca Ore says of herself that she “was born in Louisville, Kentucky and grew up in South Carolina before fleeing to New York where I went to Columbia University’s School of General Studies, took buildings hostage with the help of radical friends, and generally spent time in the city. I’ve now lived in the Philadelphia area for five years. Philadelphia is to cities what Floyd, Virginia, is to country — tolerant, beautiful, and cheap.” If this novel’s any indication, she, like Sharyn McCrumb, certainly has a fine grasp of the Appalachian culture.

Bracken County, nestled in the Blue Ridge region of the Appalachian Mountains, is quite unlike any other place on Earth. Behind its apparently quiet facade of small-town Southern life, magic works rather effectively — far too effectively — and corrupts everything that it touches. Maude Fuller, now resident on the West Coast, has been running very hard from her destiny as a witch for a long, long time. Now Maude’s grandmother is dying and she must go home, as Bracken County is quite literally calling her home. Maude’ll try anything to save granny’s soul — and I do mean [ital]anything to save her! Yes, this is gothic horror, Southern style!

All you need to know is that magic may well be rampant in Bracken County, but barely exists elsewhere, so Maude is the only (!!!) witch in Berkeley (now there’s a true fantasy!) — and she left Bracken County largely to escape the curse of being a witch. Hell, she’s fucking an engineer, a man who knows in his very soul that the Universe isn’t governed by magic, but rather has a scientific basis. But Bracken County is definitely not part of that reality as magic really does rule there. (The motif in fiction of witches in rural Appalachian communities is a deep one in our culture. Even the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series has Tara, a character whose rural mountain-born-and-raised family believes all the women in that family are witches.) So she comes home — very reluctantly — to a place where falcons are much more than mere birds and the DEA choppers looking for marijuana meet a rather messy fate.

Maude will in the end discover just how strong the witcheries of Bracken County are. She will also become painfully aware that one’s roots cannot be denied if one is a witch born and bred, for the blood of witches is far thicker than the blood of mundane folk. This novel is considered a ‘feminist’ novel but it really is much better than this appellation would lead one to believe, as what it really is is a novel with strong, intelligent female characters. The magic of family, quilting, shotguns, cockfights, moonshine, and very strange grandmothers is woven together in a way that is both riveting and complex.

The Songcatcher is a volume in Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad series which examines life in the Appalachian Highlands as reflected in the folk music tradition of that culture. Born, bred, and still living in Appalachia, McCrumb’s mountain roots and her Scottish-Irish heritage show themselves strongly in her work. It is well-known that McCrumb has said many times she would like to be remembered for her Ballad series above all else. It is quite obvious that McCrumb has a deep affection for these books.

The Songcatcher has a more straightforward plot than some of the other Ballad novels. In 1751 Islay (off the coast of Scotland), Malcolm McCourry is shanghaied and turned into a slave on board a ship heading to the New World. On the voyage, he hears and learns a typically haunting ballad (I’m bein’ quite serious — is there any other kind in a mystery novel?). In the Colonies, McCourry makes the most of his ill fate and soon becomes a member of the legal profession, after apprenticing himself to a lawyer, and starts a family. He hands down the ballad to his sons who in turn hand it down to their sons and so forth. One does wonder how much the song in good ‘Oxford Girl’ fashion drifted in content down the centuries!

Several centuries later, folksinger Lark McCourry flies from her California home to see her ailing father. When her plane crashes in the Carolina Mountains, she calls police dispatcher Ben Hawkins. However, she wastes her cell phone battery by asking for his help in finding the family song she vaguely remembers from her youth rather than for her rescue. He turns to Nora Bonesteel, who can help with the song, but not with finding Lark. Bonesteel adds a touch of magical realism to this and the other novels in the series as she has The Sight, the ability of the Irish and Scottish banshees to predict when Death Himself will come visiting. (She also talks to the Dead as does at least one other character in Ballad novels The Songcatcher and Ghost Riders.) Will Lark be found? What the bloody hell is this centuries-old ballad ’bout? Can the modern and the traditional co-exist peacefully? And will the ghosts of the past and present find a sense of peace? Maybe, maybe not.

The Songcatcher is a tale that ambles across two and a half centuries with a sense of ‘we’ll get there eventually if need be’. The novel has ‘nough detail that readers get a full look into strong characters caught up in a culture that values tradition over all other things. And The Songcatcher, like her other Ballad novels, has an ending that reasonably wraps everything up. This is a complex tale — something McCrumb revels in. Her website notes “My books are like Appalachian quilts…..I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.” And though The Songcatcher is part of a series with recurring characters, it can be read as a stand-alone novel. Once again, McCrumb has turned out a superb novel for us to enjoy!