At the center of Madison Smartt Bell's Haiti trilogy, Master of the Crossroads covers the period embracing the acme of the power and achievements of Toussaint Louverture at the close of the eighteenth century. As with the first volume, however, there are many other characters whose stories make the narrative weave of the novel, and Toussaint himself remains deeply inscrutable.

The Tortugan gun smuggler Xavier Tocquet, who was one of my favorite characters in the first book, continued thus in this one. His mate Elise Thibodet takes on a great deal of additional depth. A character whom I came to like particularly here was Moustique, the son of the martyred priest Pere Bonne-Chance. In this arc of the story, he matures into a role as a "bush priest," drawing on both Catholic and Vodun spiritual sources. Riau, the fils Ginen (Hatian enslaved from Africa) who provides the first-person perspective in parts of All Soul's Rising continues that role in this volume, and also enjoys some prophetic dreams. I think I can foresee something of the destiny awaiting Riau, and it will be interesting to find if I am correct in the third book.

On the whole, the continued investment in such characters makes this book even more rewarding to read than its predecessor. And there are impressive figures introduced for the first time as well, of course, such as Madame Fortier, mother to the villainous Choufleur.

Although these books center on violent revolt and warfare, and they feature involved descriptions of carnage and atrocity, this novel comprehends perhaps a number of births of named characters to rival the number of such particularized deaths. The political flux transpiring here certainly doesn't inhibit procreation, and it provides a backdrop for some experiment in, for examples, the marriage of a concubine, polyandry, and interracial adoption!

The author's fidelity to historical detail is shown here not only by the auxiliary chronicle of Saint Domingue 1789-1805 (as it was in the first book), but the further appendix including the original French texts from Toussaint's correspondence that are quoted at length in English translation in the body of the novel.

The frame story established in the first volume has Toussaint in an Alpine prison in 1802, and Bell continues that here also. Its presence reminds the reader that the often thrilling events of the novel are contained by historical eventuality, and even so, it creates a narrative thread of its own that looks forward to an obscure resolution in the final volume of the trilogy.

http://moloch981.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/il-signore-dei-crocevia/ ( )