the Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

the i paper 6 august 2021

The American Civil War can hardly be said to be underexplored in fiction, from Gone with the Wind to Little Women to Cold Mountain. Until recently, however, novels featuring the backdrop have tended to focus on macho soldiers and the women they left behind.

The 29-year-old Texas-based author Nathan Harris was drawn to a fresh perspective on this subject matter in his debut novel as a way to understand the history of his own family: “All black writers are drawn to filling in their past,” he has said.

In Harris’s book, it is not just race that makes his characters’ lives precarious as the war ends. A passionate affair between two Confederate soldiers who were childhood friends must be kept secret as they return to Old Ox, the Georgia town they are both from. This is perhaps an echo of the gay couple fighting in the American Civil War in Sebastian Barry’s Costa Prize-winning novel Days Without End.

In The Sweetness of Water, last week longlisted for the Booker Prize, there are also two brothers, Landry and Prentiss, who have recently been freed from slavery and must work out what to do with their freedom. They find themselves on the land of George Walker, who is originally from New England and, perhaps by virtue of inherited wealth, somewhat eccentrically sticks to his own principles. He hires the brothers to work on his land and provokes the ire of the local townspeople by paying them a decent wage.

The friendship between Walker and the two freed men nonetheless helps him live again as he and his stoic wife Isabelle grieve the loss of their only son in the war. At mealtimes, Isabelle observes that her dinner table hosts “an assortment of damaged bodies collected together to gain sustenance”.

Of Mice and Men seems to be an obvious model for the dynamic between the brothers: Landry was beaten so badly and frequently while enslaved that he has stopped speaking, but looms over Prentiss, his quick-witted brother.

Harris is a writer of great lyricism and power – he can lend even laundry emotional significance: “A bleary glance out the window revealed his mother dipping his pants into the boiling water of the copper washing kettle… He thought he would have to go pant-less about his home, until he remembered the drawer full of clothes across the room, a bounty to a man who had held on so dearly, to so little, for so long.”

Some of the plotting is a little far-fetched and a beautiful, dignified prostitute – whose characterisation only narrowly escapes cliché – also features, but this remains an arresting debut.

This review first appeared in the i paper