HUNG BE THE HEAVENS WITH SCARLET

In Sylvester’s historical novel, a murder mystery temporarily unites two troubled men in 1863 on the eastern end of the Erie Canal.

Jimmy Ryan, a large man with unruly flaming red hair, has been back in his hometown of West Troy, New York, for three years, living in a simple boarding house. One day, he stares out the window at a crowd assembling around the canal. He knows what that means: His services are needed to retrieve another body submerged near the lock. But this time it is not a canaller who has met his demise; the victim is 14-year-old Tess Fowler, the sweet and vivacious daughter of a prominent West Troy family, who is lying in the frigid water. Like Jimmy, she was an avid reader with a special fondness for poetry. And she was always kind toward Jimmy, a man who has seen too much blood and experienced too much rage in his life. As a young man, he was an accomplished student, and he secured a scholarship to Princeton University. But his intellectual abilities did not prepare him for the snubs and barbs from the upscale, pampered student body. In his freshman year, he was provoked into a fight that resulted in his being expelled. His one friend at Princeton was his roommate, who convinced Jimmy to volunteer with him to fight in the Mexican War—it was to be an adventure. It turned out to be a bloodbath that, for the past 15 years, has left Jimmy tortured by visions of the carnage. After working as a canaller on the Erie for 10 years, he has begun to overcome his more reckless impulses. Further down the line of boats waiting for the locks to reopen, readers meet Jack Carraway, a young man who arrives from Minnesota having left behind the girl to whom he was betrothed. His intent is to journey eastward to visit the large Northeastern cities and to write about his adventures. Traveling as a passenger on an Erie barge from Buffalo, he now plans to find passage on the canal sidecut that connects with the Hudson River. But when he meets Jimmy, he teams up with him to uncover Tess’ killer.

Sylvester’s haunting dramatic narrative begins and ends with tragedy. Set during an era when the country was divided by the Civil War, racial hatred, and political, economic, and social strife, the narrative and the personal battles of its main protagonist, Jimmy Ryan, reflect the turmoil of the times. The battlefields may be in the South, but the North also is roiled by riots and conflicts between those in favor of and those opposed to the war. Edgy, philosophical, and touching, this story of America’s past shares stark similarities with the country’s present. In compelling prose, Sylvester packs his pages with historical personages and intriguing details, such as the composition of the mid-19th century’s Supreme Court (six out of nine justices were from the South, five of them slave owners) as well as a motivation behind the Mexican War (to obtain territory for additional slave-owning states). Vivid descriptions of life on and along the Erie Canal are poignantly punctuated by Jack Carraway’s recognition that the railroad will eventually make the canal obsolete, leading him to ponder the price of progress: “Where the trains stopped, new towns would appear, and new prosperity. And the old canal towns, what of them?”

A disturbing, thought-provoking, and historically rich tale that lingers.