Rereading Review: "Intruder in the Dust" by William Faulkner

Revisiting Faulkner has to be one of those special experiences. It's not like revisiting Dickens because Dickens is pretty easy to engage with whereas Faulkner expects you to find the engagement a laborious process with these long descriptions with very little to no punctuation. At least with Dickens long narratives and descriptions are often interrupted by side stories and back stories, Faulkner gets his hands dirty with the Southern Gothic, often talking at length on one particular scene from one very specific viewpoint. A reading experience of Faulkner is somewhat akin to reading the Bible, it's something you have to wrestle with because at the end of the day there's going to be a lot you must wrestle with inside such as: ideas and even the names to which people are referred - though it is still well-written.

Of course, my favourite Faulkner novel of all time is Absalom, Absalom! and if you only read one Faulkner novel this year then please make sure it's that one. It is truly a fantastic Southern Gothic text and it is frankly earth-shattering in its prose and contexts.

Lucas, a black man, is being jailed for the murder of a white man named Vinson Gowrie - but Lucas is also trying to protest his innocence whilst this is going on. Hiring some support from the law, he wants to prove to these lynch mobs and weirdos that are threatening to kill him that he did not, in fact, kill anyone. Faulkner's ability to paint a picture of racial prejudice has always been something I have admired, he seems to be able to do it with ease (I think it's because he lived in the time and place and so, was lifting them straight out of reality). He doesn't use an overtly heavy hand to make it obvious, but when the hints and pins are all dropped, what we can see is something that makes the justice system in America look like a damned joke for the way it has treated marginalised people.

Once he has some help from the law, Lucas tells them that if they want to see his innocence then they better dig up the grave of Vinson Gowrie for themselves. Not believing a word of what Lucas is saying they do exactly that and find that the body inside that grave doesn't belong to Gowrie but in fact belongs to another man named Jake Montgomery. Now, as I was reading this book in a hospital waiting room, what attracted me back to it was literally staring me in the face: it was the fact that Faulkner was trying to be a little humorous with his writing, something that I was not familiar with when I read it the first time. I have to say, I prefer it when Faulkner gets dark like in Absalom, Absalom! but, I can appreciate this too.

People now start investigating what happened here and why there is a different body in the grave, atop of this they also want to know where Vinson Gowrie is and whether he is alive or not. In this strange series of events which includes a body swap and a bunch of racist people, there's something that Faulkner carefully puts his finger on: the fact that nobody would believe the story of a black man who is proclaiming his innocence until they literally have to go and disturb the site of someone's grave to get proof. Honestly, it is really quite something that Faulkner does with the story here, especially when it comes to taking the piss out of the American judicial system.

The writing is lovely, there's lush descriptions of land, there's long passages that feel like photographs and of course, there are a whole host of characters each with their own tragic flaw. In Faulkner's typical style, the book doesn't really have a massive ending, it just closes almost on a downward note. There's something that almost feels unfinished, something that feels left unsaid and ultimately, it is the ending that exposes the true racism that pervades America (I would argue in some ways to this day). Faulkner was very much ahead of his time for writing this and genuinely, I loved revisiting it.