SAVAGE LIBERTY

Fiction
And the winner is –

SAVAGE LIBERTY:

A Mystery of Revolutionary America

By Eliot Pattison

387 pp. Counterpoint

Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo

This is the second book by Pattison I have reviewed and the fifth I have read. I have a passion for historical novels, and mysteries in particular. Eliot Pattison delivers both history and mystery, and no more so than in Savage Liberty.

Following up in the Bone Rattler series, protagonist Duncan McCallum returns as the skilled warrior-hero who dares all and survives by his strength and wits. No matter we have to suspend disbelief at times - McCallum evades more death traps than Indiana Jones, escapes traitorous allies, is blind-sided by self-serving American patriot rebels, is chased and tortured by self-serving Royalists, and finds himself once again the target of Lord Ramsey’s revenge for daring to love his daughter. This is the classic entertainment portion of a Pattison novel. It works for the most part.

In Boston harbor aboard a gig, avoiding the launch of a Royal Navy revenue cutter, alongside merchants Robert Livingston and John Hancock...

Duncan pushed down his temper and saw that [Royal Officer of Marines] Beck was indeed watching, now through a telescope. He placed the body on the bench beside him, pulled open the dead man’s tunic and, with a deft movement, lifted the little book - as if from the body - before stuffing it inside his own waistcoat.

He did not have to turn back to Beck to confirm that he had seen. Beck began screaming for the launches to intercept the gig.

Duncan turned back to Hancock and Livingston. “You knew they sought it,” he ventured, “and you wanted to pretend that you, too, were trying to find it. You were toying with my life.”

....Duncan touched the little doeskin pouch, adorned with Iroquois quillwork, that hung inside his shirt. His spirit totem was sleeker than a fish. “Why?” he asked. “Why the charade of searching for the ledger you know was stolen by Pine’s killers?” Another uneasy glance passed between the two merchants, and Duncan realized he had asked the wrong question. “Why does the navy so desperately want it?”

And so begins this tale of adventure and intrigue. Furiously intense competition over a sabotaged merchant ship to recover a mysterious ledger, the secrecy of the two American merchants who were at the center of the newly formed Sons of Liberty, and the persistent feel that there was a lot more to this caper than met the eye all add to the page-turning enticement and power of a Pattison novel. The solution is many pages away but we already begin to feel a bit nervous about the agenda of these self-anointed patriots.

Most interesting is Pattison’s attention to historical details typically omitted from high school history class, as well as incorporation of Native American lore and practice. In Savage Liberty, Duncan has lived with Natives for several years, spent time learning the skills of the woodland warriors, and was inducted into several of the elite societies of the tribes. He fought with Rogers Rangers in the French-Indian War. His medical training in Scotland ended with the Jacobite rebellion, and his skills of observation and deduction were honed working with the Natives. He is considered a Deathspeaker –  what we might call a medical pathologist. This we learn in previous Bone Rattler books. Except for a few, brief references, Pattison does not bore us with History Channel-style reiteration in Savage Liberty.

Duncan is the indentured servant of Sarah Ramsey, whom he also loves but cannot marry until his indenture ends. This is Duncan’s biggest fault other than his bullheadedness. His honor won’t allow him to break that indenture for fear of risking Sarah’s good name. She does not share that concern, having been trained from an early age by her Iroquois captors to be a warrior as much as Duncan had been trained by Highlanders to defend their clans.

She has established a small farming community in central New York colony where she welcomes all comers. The tension between the two lovers is a central theme in these novels and is used well as a tool to address backstory and internal emotion.

Duncan touched Sarah’s shoulder, and she twisted again out of his reach. “If I don’t track this to the end,” he said to her, “they will find me. Even at Edentown. I keep seeing those dead, Sarah, all those bodies on the beach at Boston. Those innocent dead are owed the truth. The truth belongs to the dead.” At first he thought it meant that secrets died with the dead, but as the Deathspeaker he had come to realize that it meant the truth was a debt the living owed the dead.

Sarah glanced at him and looked away. “Duncan, I have a terrible feeling about this. I’ve had wrenching dreams myself, about the tribes and us.”

.... All the years he had been with her, from the day he rescued her from a suicidal leap into the stormy Atlantic, she had never used dreams against him. It was a force of tribal culture..... He knew better than to treat such dreams lightly. These were powerful omens.

The plot is intricate, as one might expect from a Pattison book. It begins in Boston Harbor, moves to the wilderness of 1768 Massachusetts, travels through the Green Mountains of Vermont (complete with Ethan Allen), stops at Fort Ticonderoga, and ends near a missionary village in New York colony.

Revolution carries as much duplicity as does tyranny, and one undercurrent of this book is Pattison’s implied question – do the means validate the end, or does the end justify the means? And, if so, who is the winner?

In Savage Liberty, the clear winner is the reader.