John C. Kerr is a native of Houston, Texas, and currently lives with his wife Susan in San Antonio. He is a graduate of Stanford University, where he studied history, literature, and poetry, and of the University of Texas Law School.

The Silent Shore of Memory is his fifth published novel. His previously published novels, which are available in the US, the UK, and British Commonwealth countries, are Cardigan Bay, A Rose in No Man’s Land, Fell the Angels, and Hurricane Hole.  In addition, he co-authored with his late father Only a Khaki Shirt: A Memoir of the Pacific War.

FICTION

John C. Kerr

The Silent Shore of Memory: A Novel

Texas Christian University Press

Paperback, 978-0-87565-619-9 (also available as an ebook), 240 pgs., $22.95

February 24, 2016

Beginning in a makeshift Confederate Army hospital in the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg, we follow Lieutenant James Barnhill, of San Augustine, Texas, through decades of radical historical change: civil war, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Klan, robber baron monopolies, destruction of the East Texas pine forests, and the rise of Populism, to name a few. The Silent Shore of Memory, John C. Kerr’s fifth novel, is historical fiction with the scope of biography.

Barnhill is wealthy and educated, bearing more than a passing resemblance to another fictional lawyer, Atticus Finch, in both personal and political particulars. Barnhill is for some time a widower raising children with the help of a black housekeeper and he defends a black man against a charge of raping a white woman. While Barnhill is fairly complex, Kerr’s other characters tend toward familiar stereotypes of the era.

Kerr has Barnhill return to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution throughout the book as a mechanism for exploring conflicted feelings about the war, the future of the freed slaves, and the fate of the “genteel” antebellum way of life. Kerr strives to make a point that some plantation owners treated their slaves well, such as Barnhill’s father at whose plantation “the blacks…intermingled freely with his family.” This goal sometimes leads to a romantic and sentimental view. Barnhill’s recently deceased father has manumitted his two hundred African slaves in his will. Barnhill’s mother must survive on the East Texas cotton plantation with no husband and her only son thousands of miles away in the Confederate Army. “At first she had feared that the freedmen would melt away,” says the narrator of Mary Barnhill, “but they were as dependent on her continuing patronage as she was on their continuing labor, an unwritten, unspoken understanding of mutual obligation built on years of respect and fair treatment.” While such paternalism may have been typical of the time and place, modern readers may be unsympathetic with this attitude, even in fiction.

Civil War buffs will appreciate The Silent Shore of Memory for its historical details of battles, army divisions, geography, and strategy. Kerr writes knowledgably of the details and deprivations of nineteenth-century army life and movingly of the surrender at Appomattox. Barnhill’s legal battles to restore trust in the rule of law post-Reconstruction, such as insisting upon search warrants, and fighting the railroad monopolies, are unexpected and creative touches. The larger plot points are predictable, but the pacing is even and brisk. The story comes to an unfortunately abrupt ending, however, and may disappoint readers who have enjoyed most of the book.

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