Book Review

Russel Banks’ The Magic Kingdom

God.”

So one part of the enjoyment of reading this novel comes from seeing how all this works in the day-to-day lives of the Elders and other principal characters.

Novelist Russell Banks’ last novel, “The Magic Kingdom,” has both historical roots and a wholly fictional love triangle.

Published last year, this novel will be Banks’ last in the full sense of the word, for he died this last January. Fittingly, in it he brought to bear interests seen in previous novels.

It is not his first historical novel, for instance. He based “Cloudsplitter” on the life of abolitionist John Brown. He based “The Magic Kingdom” on a long-ago Shaker community named Olive Branch near Orlando, FL, and the present-day Disney Magic Kingdom.

Re-naming the community “New Bethany,” Banks is faithful to the time and place of the real Shaker community, which owned over 7,000 acres in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And he did a lot of research on how Shaker communities were organized and operated, all of which makes the novel an educational read.

The two-dozen Shakers in Banks’ New Bethany live as a commune, with no private property. They follow the dual leadership of a male and a female elder, named Elder John Bennett and Eldress Mary Glynn. All the Shakers perform tasks assigned by the elders, mostly herding and farming but also woodworking, tailoring, shoemaking, cooking, and teaching, making the community self-sufficient and also enabling the Shakers to sell their excess on the open market.

They are Christian in the main, believing in the divinity of Jesus. But they add a second divinity, their founder Mother Ann, who they believe abides with Jesus and will return with him at the Second Coming. They pray to both and conduct regular church services. Their work and religious lives come together in their guiding principle, “Hands for work, hearts for

The other part comes from the fictional plot involving the love triangle among the narrator Harley Mann, his love interest Sadie Pratt, and Elder John—a surprising basis for the plot given that Shakers lived celebate lives of sexual abstinence. Here’s how Banks works it out:

It seems that Harley came to New Bethany as a twelve-year-old when his widowed mother moved the family there around 1900 and became a practicing Shaker. They’d lived in a different idealistic but secular “Ruskinite” community beforehand. The plot follows Harley for the next ten years of his life there.

The community expects youths who turn 18 either to make professions of faith and become Shakers or to leave the community. Harley lives outwardly as a Shaker but inwardly does not believe, secretly calling himself a scientific rationalist and an atheist.

Though Harley never makes a profession, the Shakers never force the point and he continues living there as a Shaker beyond 18. It seems that Elder John, who has become a father figure and mentor, is grooming him as the most likely community member to lead the group when he passes the torch.

Then there’s Sadie, a former patient at a nearby tuberculosis sanitarium who comes to live at New Bethany when the sanitarium closes. Like Harley, she is not a Shaker but follows Shaker customs while living there. She is a few years older than Harley, but as he matures that difference matters less and less. Finally they become secret lovers.

And that’s when the simmering crisis comes to full boil. Harley has long been jealous of Elder John’s attention to Sadie, suspicious that he is also a secret lover of Sadie, though she denies it. As Sadie’s disease progresses and she grows weaker and weaker, readers know some drastic event is looming. I won’t reveal what happens as I don’t want this review to be a “spoiler,” but I will say that the catastrophe is based on a real, historical catastrophe that shook the real community of Olive Branch over 100 years ago.

Banks’ way of telling the story adds to its realism and interest. He pretends to have come across a cache of audio tapes recorded by Harley Mann as an 82-year-old retiree living in St. Cloud, FL, in 1971, with each reel of tape becoming one chapter in the novel. Banks has made young men his central characters in earlier novels like “Rule of the Bone” and “Lost Memory of Skin,” but this is the first time he has made the same character both a youth and a senior citizen. He carries off the task admirably, giving readers the wisdom of an older man reflecting on his own actions and motives as a much younger man.

Banks himself was 82 when he died last January. N