Books like Wind from the Carolinas

Before I talk about the book proper, I've got to talk about this edition of it. Never in my life have I read a professionally published work so completely half-arsed. Formatting errors, mystifying typos on every single page, and regular printing errors too. The parties responsible for the production of this thing didn't give one half of a shit, I doubt if it was subbed at all.I bought this book in The Bahamas, where the story is primarily set, from a bookstore in a nicer part of New Providence. The kindly older woman behind the counter warned me rather sternly to be very careful, and not go wandering around lest I fall upon misadventure. I laughed this off with little more than a wink, for at the time I thought myself a rather worldly motherfucker - and besides, I'd survived Iran and North Korea without any major mishap, how much trouble could I really encounter in an island paradise like this?It was 20 minutes into my not-altogether-consensual conversation with the verifiable insane Jamaican homeless man selling bootleg DVDs from the front of an abandoned apartment building in the infamous Over-the-Hill district, that I realised there might have just been something to her warning. Jay was a fervent Christian, recently converted from a life of bastardry and hooliganism. He'd written signs with a marker on old cardboard boxes and hung them facing the roadway from an old chain-link fence, preaching the gospel in his own near-incomprehensible way. In the course of our near hour-long conversation, he told me not so long ago he'd have killed and robbed me without even thinking. But he went on to say that his belief in god had changed him, and that if talked with me and let me go, I might come back and buy a DVD.I regret to say I never did. Jay was a rather large bloke, and I didn't fancy my chances if he'd had a change of heart by the time I got back. I hope he stopped getting beaten by the police, and went to a doctor about the storm raging in his head.This book is fantastically racist. Shockingly, unapologetically so. It was written in the late 1960s, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was 100 years earlier. Every colour and shade is not only presented as normal, but often what the author appeared to think were the rational reasons behind it were explained throughout. There's even a healthy dose of Confederate sympathising that picks up about midway through and doesn't let up.The scope of this book follows a line of descent over about 150 years of the Cameron family, who make their way to Exuma, Bahamas, after the completion of the War of Independence. Loyal British subjects that they were, they could no longer stand to live amongst this democratic rabble - so they left.We then follow successive generations through cycles of boom and bust, wealth and poverty, joy and disaster. The protagonists of the story constantly shifting to the next generation as the prior becomes geriatric or dead. In the first few of these cycles, the time taken to build the characters up and make them familiar is painstaking. And while blockade running and piracy take place throughout, most of the time the narrative focuses in on the domestic life of the characters, and their personal and interpersonal struggles.The major theme throughout seems to be that those that shy away from the changing times flounder and perish, those that embrace it flourish and prosper. Which considering again the astounding racism throughout a book written by an educated American at the height of the civil rights movement, is more than a little ridiculous.Finally in the latter part of the book, in the second-to-last generation to be focused on by the narrative, we finally get a bit of privateer action played out in full. One of our protagonists lucks into a deal to supply the first generation of Cuban revolutionaries. He ends up imprisoned in a Spanish fort's dungeon for some time, before finally being smuggled out by a sympathetic guard bought off by one his benefactors, a member of the Cuban aristocracy.Then we're right back into the cycle of romance and domesticity. He fell in love with the daughter of said rebellion-fomenting aristocrat, they move to the islands, and on we go. The whole second half of this book, as the time jumps and passage of time generally begin to increase evermore rapidly, gets pretty biblical. So-and-so begat so-and-so who begat so-and-so, etc., etc., etc. I barely understood who in the fresh fuck these people were and what their relationship was to the last people I actually had a firm grasp on the lineage of. The author seems to understand this, and has the original pirate stereotype as a very old man think to himself in confusion, recalling in order the current cast of characters and their relationship to one another and the original cast. Then seemingly thinking this what enough, as the family tree was sprawling ever outwards, two of the characters turn out to have barren wives, thereby simplifying the tangled web he had to weave.This thing's alright, ultimately. A romantic period-piece adventure, set in a far-off tropical world. It'd make a decent BBC mini-series that my mum'd really like.And a special note to Far Horizons LLC, the publishers. Hire me as a subeditor, it would literally be impossible for me to be worse than whatever semi-illiterate moron you've got on the job at the moment.