We're back in Florida. Not this guy, but instead the south-easternmost state of the USA, dangling pendulously into the north-eastern reaches of the Gulf of Mexico like, well, a dangly pendulous thing. In particular we're back in the south-western corner of the state where the events of Killing Mister Watson took place, events that included, as you'll know if you were paying attention at the time or are capable of reading the book's title, the killing of Edgar "EJ" Watson by a ragged posse of his fellow dwellers in the loose gaggle of islands at the outflow where most of the water in the Everglades - which is really just a sixty-mile-wide, shallow, slow-moving river - meets the sea and where there is a complex and ever-changing landscape.
But why did they shoot him? Well, part of the answer to that question is: go and read the first book. But many questions remain, and by the time the narrative here starts at least four decades have passed - it's never completely clear what date this all happens, but the best bet seems to be late 1940s or early 1950s. Many people have found their subsequent lives defined and haunted by the events of 1910 (i.e. the murder of EJ Watson), especially those who were there on the day and who may or may not have fired some of the shots that took Watson down, but also Watson's own children, of whom there were at least ten by at least five different women.
Our principal business here is with Lucius Watson, youngest child of Watson's second wife Jane, and around twenty-one when Watson was killed. He's been various things over the years, from a fisherman to a respected academic historian, and is now back in the area stirring up unwelcome memories. This is partly for research purposes for a book he's preparing about the Watson murder (in the hope of rehabilitating his father's murderous reputation), partly because it's come to his attention that the National Parks organisation that now oversees the Everglades is considering knocking down The Watson Place, his father's old house at Chatham Bend in the islands, and partly because his long-lost older brother Rob Watson has reappeared after many years, somewhat the worse for many years of drink and gnawing guilt about his association with some of his father's murkier deeds.
Hardly surprisingly, most of the natives of the area who have any knowledge about the events of 1910 are a bit cagey about coughing it up, particularly to the son of the murder victim who might have his own motives for getting a clear picture of who was at the dock and the order of who shot whom and when. And the order is obviously important here, since the early shots will have been the ones that did the damage; anyone who shot later would have basically been pumping lead into a corpse, somewhat less culpable, morally speaking. Moreover, Lucius' evident desire to include a visit to The Watson Place in his trip makes certain individuals nervous, the house now being used for other slightly shady purposes that those individuals don't want him, still less the Park authorities or the police, knowing about.
Lucius is a cautious and circumspect type, but the same cannot be said of his brother Rob, and after some unwise shooting his mouth off and some actual shooting of firearms (thankfully not resulting in any casualties) he is kidnapped by some of the locals now making use of The Watson Place for nefarious purposes, including, slightly awkwardly, the father of Lucius' research assistant and very occasional lover Sally Brown.
Lucius, Sally, local man Andy House (whose father may or may not have been one of EJ Watson's executioners) and Sally's intermittently estranged husband Whidden Harden take a boat out into the Ten Thousand Islands archipelago to visit The Watson Place and try to rescue Rob. Lucius has come into possession of a letter from Rob which appears to be a confession of his involvement, at his father's instigation, in the murders of Wally and Bet Tucker in 1901, and an explanation for the restless and tormented life he has led since, and appears also to have been written as a final confession in the expectation of his own imminent death.
Lucius and his party head for the Watson Place, where there is a showdown with some of the smugglers who have been using it and the place eventually burns down with Rob inside, partly at his own instigation. Returning to the mainland, Lucius learns that his old friend Henry Short, one of the few black men in the area in the early twentieth century, is in hospital and not expected to survive. Their brief deathbed conversation seems to resolve the vexed question of who shot first (it would have been Watson had his damp shotgun not misfired, and then Henry shot him) and answer most of Lucius' questions. His plan of restoring his father's reputation having been scuppered by Rob's letter and its depiction of cold-blooded murder, Lucius abandons his project.
This is the second book in the Watson trilogy - the third, Bone By Bone, offers the events of the first book from Watson's own perspective in a Rashomon/Alexandria Quartet/Gilead style. The trilogy was later reworked into a single book, Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008 (Lost Man's River was originally published in 1997). Much of the eventual trimming that was required to whittle the original trilogy down to single-book length apparently came from Lost Man's River, and it's easy to see why - there's a lot of talking here with various extended family members, including reminiscences of who was cousin to whom and the like (much of which prompts keeping a finger in the family tree section at the front of the book just to keep track of who's who) that doesn't have any direct bearing on the murder of EJ Watson and, while interesting in its own right, doesn't really drive the narrative along with any urgency.
There is a sense, though, in which that's not really what the book (and the trilogy as a whole) is about; instead it's about the place in which the story happens, its remoteness and desolation and the sense of everything being temporary at best and subject to being rearranged or obliterated by one good cathartic hurricane. Although Matthiessen primarily thought of himself as a novelist, he published many books about travel and nature and those concerns evidently bled through into his fiction writing.
So while it has much to commend it it's probably not as good as the first book, and it's quite slow and therefore probably not for everyone. It's a blunt tool as it ignores outside influences that may have affected my reading opportunities, but the fact that it's taken me two months almost to the day to read it tells its own story.
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