Matt Bondurant (2010) The Wettest Country in the World.

The author describes this as ‘A Novel Based On A True Story.’ The true story is The Great Moonshine Conspiracy of 1935. The true story is of the great depression and Prohibition and of dirt poor farmers scrambling to get enough to eat and keep their land. The true story is of the author’s forefathers and their family: Granville Bondurant who on the death of his wife, sons and daughter in the great flu epidemic of 1919 claimed: ‘All the goodness has gone out of the world.’ The surviving brother’s story is the story of survival: Howard the strongest man in the Franklin county; Forrest the most tenacious, who survives the flu, getting his throat cut ear to ear, gets shot and is run over by a ton of timber; and Jack, the youngest, and most ordinary . It’s also the story of men who can fix things with a bit of wire and lots of gumption. Men who work in the mill all day, do field work and tend illegal stills in the mountain around Franklin at night. Men who do not bend to the law, but have their own rules. Women are the watchers and carers. Passages of the story are also narrated by a fictional figure of Sherwood Anderson, a contemporary of Hemmingway and Faulkner. I’m not really sure why. These passages don’t work for me. I don’t get them. I once did try moonshine. It was in the giro runs of the 1980s in London. One of my mate’s uncles handed me a clear class he’d watered down with vodka. I think I can still taste it. There’s some exquisite prose in Bondurant’s story. That’s all a man can ask.