Novel explores the apocalypse and religion in Mississippi

Don Noble
| Contributor

For centuries, different kinds of prophets have told us that we are living in the end times. Sometimes they know the date and lead their flock to a hilltop and wait there, then walk back down again – until now.

Secular novelists also like this theme very much. “On the Beach” tells us that the apocalypse will be an atomic cloud orbiting the Earth. But that was 1957.

More: Award-winning book explores the American South | DON NOBEL

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ describes an earth so barren that nothing will grow, and recently Silas House’s ‘Lark Ascending’ paints a picture of what could happen if the wildfires of the western US and Canada converge and racing all the way to the east.

House is here in harmony with James Baldwin who quotes the Negro spiritual in his title:

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, next time the fire!”

Michael Ferris Smith is an impressive Mississippi novelist with seven titles and has already had two of his books adapted into films. In ‘Salvage This World’ he indeed sees the end of the world coming, and it will be water again.

Ferris’ home territory is in southwestern Mississippi, the portion above Louisiana.

The rain has come. It is hurricane season all year round.

Agriculture is impossible; the fields are flooded.

There are few services. Hospitals, schools, shops and of course shopping centers are closed.

Most people have left in search of work and drier, higher ground.

One gas station now has a sign “NO GAS HERE: BEER AND LIQUOR ONLY.”

Now there is a sign of the end times.

(Luckily there are a few gas stations functioning, because these rural characters spend a lot of time driving around and doing their best behind the wheel on country roads.)

Just how bad things are is beautifully illustrated by Wade, who scrapes together a living salvage scrap, the best of which comes from defunct and abandoned HVAC units.

There is no longer any control over heating, ventilation or air conditioning. Those days are over.

Wade is Jessie’s father, Jace’s grandfather, and Holt’s father-in-law, but conventional family ties are broken.

These four, long estranged, are all on the run from Elser, a tent revival prophet who draws huge crowds, whose message is: the end is near and it is YOUR fault. She cries and the congregation fills her baskets. Part of her message is that Mississippians must reject what “they,” presumably the government, are telling them. “Do you want to die where They tell you to die or do you want to live where the rain can wash away your sin?”

Elser had the keys to “The Bottom” and Wade, who worked for her tent crew for a while, stole them. Much of “Salvage This World” consists of the ruthless, ruthless attempts of Elser’s band of thugs to find and retrieve these keys to the (presumably heavenly) kingdom, at any cost, blood and brutality.

The Bottom is both a real place and mythological. Since it cannot be found on any map, it could have been the death place of some Confederate soldiers, or an old Civil War cemetery, a fort or a defunct insane asylum. People had opinions, although “no one was sure how this was known about a place none of them had ever seen.”

Mississippians and Faulknerians know that the Big Bottom is the bottom of the Tallahatchie River, the last untouched wilderness, located in the Delta and the site of Major de Spain’s hunting camp in “The Bear.” In Faulkner it is a paradise lost to logging, agriculture and the incursions of civilization.

In this novel, The Bottom itself seems like a paradise in reverse, a hellish place that reminds me of Grendel’s mother’s underwater lair. Anyway, for these fanatics it’s real enough.

Don Noble’s latest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson and eleven other Alabama authors.

‘Save this world’

Author: Michael Ferris Smith

Publisher: Little Brown and Co.

Pages: 258

Price: $28 (hardcover)

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