George and Rue: A Novel
It was, by all accounts,, a slug-ugly” crime. Brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi’kmaq and part African, were both hanged for the killing.Those facts are also...
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It was, by all accounts,, a slug-ugly” crime. Brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi’kmaq and part African, were both hanged for the killing.Those facts are also skeletons in George Elliott Clarke’s family closet. Both repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, which he only learned about from his mother shortly before her death, Clarke set out to discover just what kind of forces would reduce men to crime, violence and, ultimately, murder. His findings took shape in the 2001 Governor General’s Awardwinning Execution Poems and culminates brilliantly in George and Rue. The novel shifts seamlessly back into the killers’ pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes comic tale of victims of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too shamed to assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all blacks as dangerous outsiders.George and Rue is a book about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark humour. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that defines Clarke’s writing, it is a remarkable literary debut.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780786718740 (0786718749)
Publish date: December 28th 2006
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Pages no: 240
Edition language: English
I can't rate this. I mean, if I were to judge it on the merits of the writing alone, it would receive five stars but damn it, it's just so brutally raw I can't do it justice. Not for the faint of heart. That much I can say.