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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