'The poeticism of the prose is exquisite': a review of The Tilted World

By Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Published 1st October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

Husband and wife writers, poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, have composed a poem of devotion to their land and to love in the form of lyrical novel The Tilted World. They weave a tender tale of lost souls in the Deep South and of discovered solace amidst the cataclysm of the great 1927 Mississippi flood.

The palpable threat of the flood is manifested through the prism of Dixie Clay – already emotionally drowned by her unhappy marriage to a bootlegger making whisky in defiance of prohibition law – and through Ingersoll, an emotionally stagnated prohibition agent, come to Mississippi as the flood waters threaten to burst the levees. When this strange, mud-caked man appears through the rain to leave a baby on Dixie’s doorstep, the world will tilt and warp the boundaries of law, friendship, community and love.

The Tilted World takes time to absorb the reader in its delicately rendered tale. The structure, which inhabits Dixie’s and Ingersoll’s thoughts episodically, does not immediately fully realise their psychologies, and boredom occasionally threatens in the opening chapters. The syntax can seem almost wilfully excluding – it is not clear from the start that the narrative voice has sprinklings of southern American phrasing, so the lack or direct and indirect objects and unnatural verb uses can be confusing. But slowly the lives of Dixie and Ingersoll become compelling, and representative of the lives of all those who lived through prohibition, who lived through the war, and through the upheavals of the Deep South at the turn of the century.

The poeticism of the prose is exquisite; metaphors are sprinkled through the book, giving you pause even as the plot surges on like the flood that propels it. Beautiful images that conjure a very specific time and place are simultaneously timeless: in the heavy wind of a low-flying navy plane ‘the corn [is] blown into italics all around’; when the Mississippi river is at breaking point Ingersoll can ‘feel the levee wavering like a struck tuning fork’; the sky is ‘gauzy and low, like a rafter cobweb Dixie Clay yearned to knock down with a broom’.

The Tilted World is a deeply-felt, elegiac homage to a particular time and to the endurance of love, unafraid to shy away from the mundane realities of life, rewarding the reader’s commitment to its tilted world.

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