Published on March 3, 2010

Walking to Gatlinburg by Howard Frank Mosher; published by Random House, New York; $25 in hardback.

Reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

And so the soldier Morgan Kinneson keeps walking because walking is what he knows to do.  He believes that if he can but walk far enough, now trending south by southwest by the general’s compass, he will get where he needs to go even if he is not quite sure where that is.

Walking to Gatlinburg is Irasburg author Howard Mosher’s second novel about an epic journey.

His 2003 book, The True Account, faithfully followed the explorations of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Coast, an account embellished only by the exploits of one True Kinneson of Kingdom County, Vermont, who beat them there.

The True Account explored a central piece of American mythology — the lure and the enormous opportunity of the west.

In Walking to Gatlinburg yet another Kinneson — a clan whose members play roles large and small in many of Mr. Mosher’s novels — explores a much more troublesome, and no less defining, part of our past.

Morgan Kinneson, who marks his eighteenth birthday in the course of the journey to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is compelled to cope with not only the physical, but also the moral hazards of slavery and its awful product, the American Civil War.

The result is a book that is rich in every way.  The characters we have come to expect in a Mosher novel are all there — particularly the villains.  Nobody does bad guys any better than Howard Mosher.  They don’t just do evil, they take particular delight in doing it, and do it so very, very well.

Young Morgan deals with these very real villains but also, because of the novel’s historical setting, he wrestles with demons created by his own difficult choices that go wrong, by the reality that people on the “right” side of a war don’t always do the right thing, and by the imperatives of his own adolescent drives.

Morgan is a free thinker, a religious skeptic if not a downright atheist, and the character who challenges his theology is a particular delight.

Slidell Collateral Dinwiddie first appears as “a willowy slip of a girl with long slim legs the rich color of the inside of a split cherry log.”

A slip this fugitive slave may be, but she’s no pushover, as Morgan learns when he laughs at her looks, disguised as a field worker and a boy:

With that she pitched onto him again, clawing like a bobcat while he tried to fend her off, to justify, to apologize, until he feared for his eyes she was ripping at him so.  Seizing her by one leg and the bib of her overalls, he none too gently tossed her into the mule watering trough.

The cobbler nodded gravely.  “That’s a woman worth hanging on to, son,” he said.

The cobbler, the son of President Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemmings, happens to be blind, but we can only agree with his judgment.

And later, when Morgan tries to point out to Slidell the wisdom of Charles Darwin’s radical new theory, she has a ready response:  “That’s flat-out slap nonsense, boy.”

“What did the great apes ever do that we have to blame them for us?”

Morgan’s “damnable walking feet” take him — and the reader — on a memorable journey that comes to a shocking conclusion.

Mr. Mosher himself is off on a journey to promote his new work.  It began Tuesday night, March 2, at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick and proceeds through southern Vermont before coming to Bear Pond Books in Montpelier on March 9 at 7 p.m.  His national tour will cover at least 100 cities and include a repeat of his journey to Tennessee, where he traveled to research the book.