Writing with attention to the details of personalities as well as to an untamed natural backdrop, Matthiessen concludes this body of work with an unexpected show of force.
Most serial tales feel, after a while, as though they have gone on too long.
It is unsettling to realize that Matthiessen avoids this pitfall by telling the same story again and again. In these retellings through myriad points of view, the narrative of the novels is split, as though through a prism, into a rainbow of encounters, hearsay and perceptions. It remains with the reader to focus these pieces back to a complete image. These tales converge around the life of Edgar Watson, a man raised in South Carolina during Reconstruction. He eventually settled in the Everglades after brushes with the law forced him out of homes in Indian territory and northern Florida.