So way back in… oh my… July I reviewed March by Geraldine Brooks and suggested a better read would be The Known World by Edward Jones and that I would do an Unappreciated Classics post on the title … aaaand here we are.

Only, much like The Road, it turns out The Known World is perhaps not so unappreciated after all, having been named in TIME’s Ten Best Books of the Decade. Which, along with Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro being named at no. 1, made me very fluffily pleased inside.

The Known World is set in the American South 20 years before the Civil War and details a lesser-known aspect of slavery – at its center is the story of the plantation of Henry Townsend, an educated slave-owning black man. The story begins with Henry’s death and takes us back into his past, detailing his loyalty to his owner, through the tribulations of his parents to buy their freedom and eventually his, to their disappointment as he uses his freedom to buy slaves for himself and set up his own plantation.

What’s stunning about this book is its wild swings of plot and the way it uses these meanderings down a maps worth of roads to explore how slavery affected every part of the society – every person and every relationship seems almost drenched in the knowledge that this is a society where people, where entire lives, are owned. The plot swoops and flies between time, location and character but somehow (nice trick) never loses the reader. The Known World plays with all your preconceptions and misconceptions, turning them inside out and then reflecting them back to you in a whole different light. The implications of people as property and chattel are immense and complex and only a book that matches this complexity could be this good.

In the end it becomes the story of a world dying under the weight of its own moral hideousness/mistakes/turpitude. Ugh, humanity.

Read it and be challenged.