Not your (grand)mother’s Gone with the Wind

Worth reading, with caveats …

First of all, Mr. McCaig has done a good job on several points with this novel. He elicits a very real sense of historical time and place. Most memorable here was the retreat of the Confederate troops from Atlanta. It was done pretty well visually in the GWTW film, but very well verbally here, without an excess of words. McCaig’s own characters are interesting. Tunis Bonneau, Rhett’s childhood friend and a freed slave’s son, gives a perspective Margaret Mitchell wouldn’t have conceived of. In addition, Rhett’s sister Rosemary is very well developed here. One gets the feeling that she is who Scarlett might have been if a man had written the character.

There are a few negatives, though. I felt like some of Margaret Mitchell’s characters got less care than then did in the original. Ashley and Melanie especially seemed out of character, a lot less dignified or genteel than they were in GWTW. (Miss Melly writing about sex and seduction in a letter to a friend? God forbid!) And at times I found myself wishing for a clearer understanding of Rhett (as there was of Scarlett in GWTW), and less so of his “people”.

Overall, I’m glad I read Rhett Butler’s People. It gave me a wider understanding of the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction South, in some ways maybe a little more realistically than GWTW did. But when it comes to Rhett Butler, nothing beats Clark Gable and the mystique of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.