DARK IN THE WILDERNESS

PETER MATTHIESSEN'S NOVEL REVISITS THE CHILLING SIDE OF THE SUNSHINE STATE

Author: By Gary Amdahl

Date: SUNDAY, December 14, 1997

Page: H1

Section: Books

This is Florida: a Florida described with loving precision by a writer not as well known as he should be for his extraordinary evocations of wilderness in such books as ``Wildlife in America'' (one of the ur-texts of what we now call the environmental movement), ``The Tree Where Man Was Born'' (which was nominated for the National Book Award), and ``The Snow Leopard'' (which won it), as well as novels like ``At Play in the Fields of the Lord'' (another nominee), and the brilliantly daring ``Far Tortuga.'' But it is not a Florida to be found in our hyper-developed Sunshine State. It is a place in which a thing like Disney World is an unimaginable monstrosity, a place now only just visible in a decimated and increasingly sterile Everglades National Park, the Ten Thousand Islands area of which is the setting for most of the novel. It is in short a Florida Peter Matthiessen makes the reader love and, as the novel makes its slow riverine progress, mourn: Page by page it vanishes.

``Lost Man's River'' is a big, complicated book, made even more so by the fact that it is a sequel to an equally complicated book, ``Killing Mr. Watson.'' The central event in both is a simple one: On Oct. 24, 1910, a group of fishermen, farmers, and merchants from around Chokoloskee gathered and -- in fear for their lives, according to sworn testimony -- shot to death, in a fusillade of some 33 rounds, a neighbor, Ed Watson.

As a fictional character, Watson is of genuinely heroic proportions. He is a pioneer in a region profoundly hostile to human life (alligators, diamondbacks as big around as a man's arm, panthers screaming in the night, and hurricanes approaching are only the beginning); an inventive, resourceful, tireless farmer (cuttings from his abandoned plantation prove to be the source of the later success of a megacorporation, United Sugar); a dedicated and loving family man (he had three legitimate families and a couple ``backdoor'' as well); and, by almost all accounts, a good friend and generous neighbor. He was also, reputedly, a cold-blooded killer of something like six people, ranging from the outlaw queen Belle Starr to his own hired help.

If such a resume sounds suspiciously historical, that is because Edgar Watson did once live on this earth and was a heroic, frightening, mysterious, uncompromisingly human figure around whom tall tales grew.

Matthiessen makes it clear, in an author's note, how he has worked the gray area: ``E. J. Watson has been reimagined from the few hard `facts' -- census and marriage records, dates on gravestones, and the like. All the rest of the popular record is a mix of rumor, gossip, tale, and legend that has evolved over eight decades into myth. . . . The book is in no way `historical,' since almost nothing here is history. On the other hand, there is nothing that could not have happened -- nothing inconsistent, that is, with the very little that is actually on record.''

``Killing Mr. Watson'' relies almost solely on first-person narratives, long monologues rendered in the speech of the islands that relate the tall tales and firsthand observations that lead up to the killing. ``Lost Man's River'' is messier in its structure, but is perhaps only the more convincing for that. Lucius Watson, E. J.'s third son (second son from the second family), is the hero here. An old man (21 when his father died, 50 years before), he has been deeply troubled all his life by his father's murder. Unable to remember his father as anything but a good man -- kind, gentle, fun, full of life -- he is therefore unable to reconcile himself to what appears to be the truth about the man's other side, a chillingly dark side from which insistently spring stories of drunkenness, racial bigotry, and sudden or stalking violence. Lucius has decided, once and for all, to hunt the sources of the legends and lies, and establish a foundation for the truth about his father's life and death.

Having spent most of his life in the solitude of emotional flight, he is at once resolute and plagued by doubt. ``All his life, Lucius's moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a dread and melancholy dragged at his spirits, as heavy as the graybeard lichen which shrouded the black corridors between the trees. In forcing his way into this road, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which, at the first faltering of his resolve, would hurl him outwards.''

After periods in the merchant marine, as a hunting and fishing guide, and a binge-drinking commercial fisherman, Lucius goes to college and earns a doctorate in history, writing a ``History of Southwest Florida'' under a pseudonym. With these credentials, he seeks out and speaks to everybody connected with the killing that he can locate. In many cases, these are people he is directly related to, who either never knew him, knew him poorly and are thrown by the pseudonym, or know him well and frankly want nothing to do with his ``stirring up of the past.'' Since Lucius drew up a list in the first years after the killing of all the men in ``the posse,'' there is a lurking sense that this quiet, well-mannered Watson has the blood of a crazy killer running in his veins and that he will, at long last, partake of the violent and fiercely clan-dominated culture of the islands, that he will kill someone in revenge. The corollary feeling of course is that Lucius instead will be killed. Complicating the quest is the sudden appearance of two long-lost half-brothers: one from the first family, a crazy drifter who may or may not hold the key to the truth about their father; the other from a backdoor family, a lawyer whose help seems frankly Machiavellian.

A great narrative unfolds here, in the overlapping, told and retold stories, confirming each other in one breath and contradicting in the next, as pungent with stubborn belief as they are unreliable, a family narrative that feels denser with American truths than any verifiable account ever could. We, along with the speakers and listeners of the novel, want to hear stories about great men brought low, and we need to hear those stories in ways that let us off the hook, that make it clear that if we are not great, we are good, or at least not bad, that our desires and secret lusts for wealth and fame and blood of enemies are not as poisonous as those of our hero/villains. Matthiessen has, with these ugly memories, homely hopes, virulent capituations to cowardice, and moments of transcendent honor, insight, and love, given us a different sort of story altogether.