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Friday, June 22, 2018

News of the World



 By Paulette Jiles
William Morrow     2016
209 pages     Historical Fiction

It is the winter of 1870, and Captain Kidd, a Civil War veteran and an itinerant news reader, is on the road in northern Texas heading toward his next news reading performance. He is stopped by two travelers who introduce him to a young girl that they have been commissioned to return to her family after having been captured by the Kiowa four years previously. Kidd agrees to take Johanna to her aunt and uncle in the San Antonio region for a $50 gold piece. He doesn’t quite understand why he decides to take this long perilous journey in a wagon and horses with this little girl, but he does. She seems to speak no English, but, boy, is she feisty. This unlikely pair bond as they make the journey, and the reader bonds with the characters, who are extremely well created.

The story itself is fascinating, but Jiles has also done meticulous historical research of post-Civil War Texas, native uprisings, loose-cannon war veterans, and the hard-working people who live in the small towns where Kidd rents space to read the newspaper to people hungry to find out what is going on in the world.  At the same time, Jiles inhabits her characters with a kind of metaphysical brilliance that transcends the stark surroundings. The reviewer in the Washington Post suggests that “The evil some people are capable of is never as important, in Jiles’s generous assessment, as the longing of many more people for peace, order, and love.”

Several things were important to me as I read News of the World. One is that I knew nothing about news readers—Captain Kidd’s retirement career. People were eager for him to come to their town and read the newspaper to them—the news of the world—and paid a dime to attend the reading. We are so inundated with news that we forget how little news people had in the past and how important it was to them. Jiles ties this in to the theme of her novel when Captain Kidd muses, “Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says: it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.” I love that thought, and I wonder what part of my message will be remembered when I am gone.

Then, I read this book in the midst of the crisis at the border of Texas over migrant and refugee children. My heart was already broken, and I couldn’t help but equate Johanna’s crisis with the current children and their trauma. Jiles even speaks to that trauma: "Perhaps it was something like this that changed the captive children forever; the violence they had endured when they were captured, their parents killed. Perhaps it sank down in their young minds and stayed there, invisible and unacknowledged but very powerful."

Finally, our family has just discovered a 4th great grandmother, Elizabeth Graham, who was captured by the Shawnee in West Virginia at age 7 and was found 8 years later by her father in Ohio. We plan to visit her home, which is a national historic monument, later in the summer.

News of the World was a great read and fostered a great discussion at book club last night. It was a National Book Award finalist and will be a movie. Tom Hanks bought the rights and he will play Captain Kidd. Wow!

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