Simon the Fiddler Saws Too Many Sour Notes

Simon the Fiddler (2020)

By Paulette Jiles

HarperCollins, 352 pages.

★★

 

                             

Paulette Jiles’ previous novel, News of the World thoroughly enchanted me, as I followed the peripatetic Captain Kidd around the West as he old newspaper stories to barely literate settlers in the American West. Simon the Fiddler is also about a sojourner, a young tunesmith who makes his way across Texas at the end of and immediately after the Civil War.

 

Simon the Fiddler has many elements I should have loved, not the least of which is Simon’s love of music. Yet, I barely finished it and found it as tonally flat as parched prairie land. The central figure is Paducah, Kentucky-bred Simon Boudlin, whose weapon of choice is a Markneukirchen violin, also known as a German Cremona. They hale from a Saxony village where quality stringed instruments have been made since the 1700s and today sell for as much as $6,000. In other words, it was quite a big deal for a young man such as Simon to have one of these and carry it around the South through the Civil War and into Texas in its waning days. It is, in fact, one of many elements in the books that straddle the improbable/impossible line.

 

What Jiles does best in her new novel is capture the craziness that prevailed as the Civil War “ended.” I placed ended in quotation marks for a reason. Glib history often labels Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, as the end of the war. Do I need to tell you that wars are born from discontent, not reason? Or that they are messy and seldom switch on and off at the drop of a Kentucky slouch hat–Simon’s sartorial head covering? The war continued in numerous places for weeks after Appomattox and the final battle of the war did not take place until May 12, 1865, when a group of Confederates routed Union troops at the Battle of Palmito Ranch, where they declared victory and surrendered on the same day!

 

Our hero, Simon, reluctantly took part in that battle. Although he was 23, his pale complexion and boyish looks allowed him to pass for 15, thus too young to fight. Plus, in a time of war, good music and a demon fiddler were rare commodities to be protected. Simon might have pulled off his subterfuge, had not his hot temper lured him into a bar fight that made him look like prime soldier material. He entered the Confederate army, saw one battle, and absconded without either an official discharge–he entered the Confederacy under a false name–nor identity papers to pass freely in occupied Texas. How did he manage? More war madness. Texas didn’t officially surrender until August 20, 1866, and even then, there were parts that held on. There was no state government, so who was in charge? Good question!

 

Jiles does a fine job of thrusting us into a world that was more like the lawless Wild West than subsequent myths of said place. We follow Simon as he makes his way from Victoria, Texas, to Galveston–138 tough miles. He assembles a band consisting of tin whistle player Damon, Tejano guitarist Doroteo, and bodhran thumper Patrick. He also meets Irish immigrant Doris Mary Dillon and is instantly smitten, though she is meticulous to his raggedness and culturally polished in ways that extend beyond Simon’s one refined trait: musicianship. Dark-haired Doris is also indentured to the tyrannical Colonel Webb for three years. We follow Simon from yellow-fevered Galveston to muddy and heartless Houston and onto San Antonio, more than 400 miles altogether and most of it on foot. His pursuits are to play music, acquire land, liberate Doris from Webb, and win her hand. Along the way Simon has adventures and squirms out of more tight holes than a fat rattlesnake.

 

In essence, Jiles gives us an adult male version of the perils of Paulette. I adore music and am very familiar with many of the tunes Simon rosined his bow to play, but it’s hard to convey the feel on the page. Jiles–a whistle player herself–over indulges in music scenes that should have flavored rather than saturated her prose. The romance was quite conventional, which one would not have anticipated between two unorthodox figures, and the book’s cliffhanger resolution defied reason.

 

I found myself wishing that Jiles had simply written a small essay on post-Civil War anarchy in Gulf and central Texas and dispensed with–if I might–the fiction of fiction. Simon the Fiddler simply didn’t strike enough realistic chords.

 

Rob Weir