Hadrian's Walls - Hardcover

Draper, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403698 ISBN 13: 9780375403699

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

This striking debut novel is an intensely powerful story of imprisonment, both behind walls and within the personal confines of human relationships.

Shepherdsville, East Texas, is a town defined--architecturally, financially, and socially--by its state penitentiaries, among them the bleak Hope Prison Farm. It's a town where virtually every inhabitant is either an inmate or a prison employee, a town where crime literally pays.

Shepherdsville's two most famous citizens are Sonny Hope, its larger-than-life prison director, and Hadrian Coleman, its most notorious convict. Their friendship since boyhood has followed a pattern of mutual dependence, keeping them at once in collusion and on opposite sides of the law. At age fifteen, introspective and emotionally vulnerable, Hadrian killed a man and was sentenced to fifty years at Hope Farm. However, twenty years later, he achieves the unthinkable and escapes from the prison.

After years of life on the run, he's summoned back to Shepherdsville to receive a full governor's pardon secured by Sonny, who now runs the prison and, by extension, the town. Hadrian knows that Sonny's motives are not entirely clean, that this is a favor that will require something in return. When the nature of that payment is finally made clear, he must determine who really owes what to whom and whether carrying out Sonny's demand will result in a lifetime spent in his power. As Hadrian vacillates between loyalty to his friend and the struggle to do right, he is pulled toward a final showdown with Sonny--a crisis that will not only change the lives of the two men but also finally free Hadrian from Shepherdsville and from his past.

Hadrian's Walls won the Steven Turner Award, given by The Texas Institute of Letters for the best first work of fiction.

About this title

Review

Hadrian Coleman, the protagonist of Robert Draper's debut novel, Hadrian's Walls, is that rare criminal who really is innocent. Not of murder (he's killed twice in self-defense), but of the further transgression of succumbing to callousness. For, despite the careful depiction of life in Shepherdsville, a mythical East Texas town whose sustaining institution is the state penitentiary, the true geography of Draper's novel is the human heart, where guilt, retribution, and love meld so confusedly that it becomes difficult to discern what confines us and what we choose to keep locked away.

Hadrian's foil and lifelong friend is Sonny Hope, the blustery and conniving prison director. In one of the book's many ironies, Sonny owes more than a slight portion of his success to Hadrian, who, while committing a defensible killing at age 15, leaves Sonny's character unsullied--and blows his own defense--by simply not revealing that his friend witnessed the incident. Thus, while Hadrian is sentenced to years behind bars, alone with the budding realization that he has sacrificed himself for Sonny's happiness, his friend succeeds despite himself, eventually rising to prison director. When, after 15 years, Hadrian kills yet again and then miraculously escapes confinement, he and Sonny start an entirely new sort of cat-and-mouse game: Sonny pardons him, Hadrian returns to Shepherdsville, and a chilling game of who-owes-what-to-whom ensues.

Draper masterfully unveils the petty politics and small-town intrigue of a town dominated by a correctional facility. The book's greatest strength, however, is the fraught interplay between Hadrian and Sonny, who move as though caught in each other's orbit. It's Hadrian's story in the end, though, as he struggles to see if he's more than what Sonny has created--and more than he himself thought. --Ben Guterson

From the Publisher

"Robert Draper has written a novel as big and fascinating as Texas itself, with larger-than-life characters to match its landscape. Masterful construction makes for a taut psychological thriller with mounting suspense. As serious as it is entertaining, Hadrian's Walls is a literary gem as well as a thriller."
--Lee Smith, author of Fair and Tender Ladies

"A strong vein of humor runs through it . . . Draper [has an] admirable ability to populate his compelling novel with vibrant characters."
--Booklist (starred review)

"In his cool, prosaically loping fiction debut, Texas journalist Draper easily entraps the reader in a Lone Star State prison town . . . [Hadrian's Walls] provides sooty, ragged, fearsome reading pleasure. . . . A breezy encounter with human darkness, carried on by the lilt of Draper's choice prose."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Robert Draper has made an exciting debut. He's got a good ear for the tones of the region and a sharp sense of how the oppressiveness of it adds its weight to the actual oppression that is his theme. I hope he finds many readers."
--Larry McMurtry, author of Duane's Depressed

"Hadrian's Walls is a great, smart read set in a world few readers ever encounter. The novel rings with truth from the dark sloughs of East Texas to the burning, corrupt cells of the Texas prison system, from the joys of a childhood friendship to the adult complexities. I found Hadrian's Walls to be a wonderful read."
--James Crumley

"[A] scorching, Faustian first novel . . . Draper skillfully balances his stark portrayal of Shepherdsville's environs and feckless inhabitants with the affecting drama that unfolds among the central characters. His ambitious novel explores the irony, pathos and contradictions both of freedom vs. captivity and of good vs. evil."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"With its lowdown, dirty mythic melodrama of a plot and hardluck honey of a hero, Hadrian's Walls would be worth reading if it were just a pageturner. But it also has the top three elements of truly great fiction: the writing, the writing, the writing. I'd say the next major Texas novelist is in the building."
--Marion Winik, author of The Lunch-Box Chronicles

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375403698
• ISBN 13: 9780375403699
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336