THE ROAD

by John Ehle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 1966

John Ehle is one of the few current writers able to command a national audience for the largely neglected genre of regional novels. His geographic area is North Carolina (see his The Land Breakers--1963) and he employs two devices with unequal success; his storytelling oversimplifies and tends to enlarge his characters beyond believable reality to almost mythological proportion, but his interpretive research into period details of dress, work methods and attitudes is peerless. Happily (and probably because the late nineteenth century setting of this story demanded it) he has dropped the rather over-powering folk dialogue he used so freely in The Land Breakers. His story of the building of a railroad line from the populated to the isolated mountain area retains the same ballad-like strength, however. It had never been done before, or at least not often enough to provide Chief Engineer Weatherby Wright with a backlog of engineering facts to draw from. It ran, from the beginning, into financial conservatism on the part of the legislature who wanted it built as an ornament to their achievement in office, and into the fundamentalist suspicions of the mountain men. So Weatherby was forced to use convict labor, make his ingenious decisions about construction methods, resolve the supply problems, brood about the use of convict labor next to free men, and face the loss of lives he commanded. The strength is in the story line simplicity and the depiction of the military deployment of men against a natural force. Certain regional response, possible bookbait for men.

Pub Date: March 8, 1966

ISBN: 1572330163

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1966

Categories: FICTION