George and Rue - Hardcover

Clarke, George Elliott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786716207 ISBN 13: 9780786716203

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2005

Synopsis

It was a “slug-ugly” crime. Brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi’kmaq and part African, were both hanged for the killing. 

Those facts are skeletons in George Elliott Clarke’s family closet. Both repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, which he learned about from his mother shortly before her death, poet, playwright and screenwriter Clarke set out to discover just what kind of forces would reduce men to crime, violence and, ultimately, murder. His findings took shape in the 2001 Governor General’s Award–winning Execution Poems and culminates brilliantly in George and Rue. The novel shifts seamlessly back into the killers’ pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes comic tale of victims of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too shamed to assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all blacks as dangerous outsiders.

This is a book about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark humor. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that defines Clarke’s writing, here is a literary debut that will be marked by celebration—and controversy.

About this title

About the Author

George Elliott Clarke is a bestselling, award-winning poet, playwright and screenwriter. He is the author of six books of poetry, including WHYLAH FALLS, a 2002 CBC Canada Reads finalist, and EXECUTION POEMS, winner of the 2001 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. He has just been named the second writer to receive a prestigious Trudeau Foundation Fellowship, an award worth up to $225,000 over three years, similar to the MacArthur Genius Award in the United States. A seventh-generation African-Canadian, Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains. Previously an assistant professor of English and Canadian Studies at Duke University, Clarke also served as the Seagrams Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at McGill University.  He lives in Toronto, where he is currently the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, but also owns land in Nova Scotia.

Reviews

African-Canadian poet Clarke returns to the subject he treated previously in verse (Execution Poems) in this lyrical, original debut novel: the true story of the 1949 murder of a taxi driver in New Brunswick, Canada, by Clarke's first cousins, brothers George and Rufus Hamilton. The author and his characters are descended from African-Americans who immigrated to Nova Scotia at the end of the Revolutionary War, and he spins his tale in "Blackened English." The result is sparkling, powerfully inventive prose. Clarke begins the brothers' story with their impoverished, part black, part Mi'kmaq Indian parents, Asa (a violent "patriarch who felt commissioned to destroy his family") and the beautiful, tawny-skinned Cynthy. For George and Rufus ("just two black boys blackened further by Depression"), this lineage dooms them from birth, if not their very conceptions in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia. George is the simpler brother, willing to make an honest living, while Rufus, the younger brother but the leader, is brighter, more creative and ruthless—he only wants "to plot piano gigs and casual thefts." Petty crime escalates to murder in a desperate hope for cash, and Clarke eloquently plots the Hamiltons' tragic trajectory toward the crime for which they hang.
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The Canadian province of Nova Scotia, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, represents an unfamiliar setting for American readers; adding to the unfamiliarity will be the specific milieu first-novelist Clarke writes about: the community of black Nova Scotians, descendants of blacks emigrating northward from the U.S. in the late--eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The author's involvement with the major characters in his novel is more than what is usual between creator and creations; brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, the protagonists here, were executed for a 1949 murder and were Clarke's first cousins. His fictionalized biography of the two men, presented in a syncopated, punchy, metaphoric voice, locates within their abusive upbringing and their drifting kind of adult lives the provenance of their inclination toward thievery and violence and, eventually, their capacity for committing the crime for which they pay the ultimate price. With some episodes too drawn out and others too telescopic--not an unusual problem with first novels----this is nevertheless a mesmerizing tale. Other novels that explore the bubbling up of violence from within one's psyche are cited in the adjacent Read-alikes column. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786716207
• ISBN 13: 9780786716203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240