This is the second of Gene Markey's novels I have read lately and written about on this blog. The first was "Kentucky Pride" which I
reviewed at this link. This novel, "That Far Paradise" is actually a prequel to "Kentucky Pride" with its protagonist being the grandfather of "Kentucky Pride"s protagonist, Aidan Kensal. The grandfather is named General Jared Kensal, a former revolutionary general who fought for American independence and is the first Kensal to settle in Kentucky on the land which becomes the setting for "Kentucky Pride". Jared Kensal is the holder of Revolutionary War land grants for several thousand acres of land near Lexington, Kentucky, and as the novel begins is preparing to relocate his family from his Virginia plantation,along with more than fifty slaves, to a fabulous home he has built on his Kentucky land. He has deeded the Virginia plantation to his brother Carter Kensal who is a heavy drinker and man of little consequence. Jared Kensal is married and has five children with his wife Ardath who is from Old Virginia upper class stock, hates the idea of moving to Kentucky and is very far removed from any positive feelings she might have had about her husband in the early days of their marriage. The husband and wife have effectively divided their children between themselves in terms of loyalty and affection. Jared has close connections to his younger son Harry, middle daughter Lexie, and the youngest daughter who is only a young child and a minor character in the novel. Ardath has close ties to the oldest daughter and son, Elizabeth and Garland who is attempting to become a doctor. Ardath attempts persistently to control all five children and prevent them from being closely attached to their father. Like most generals in most armies, Jared Kensal is a man of his own mind and forces the family relocation to take place. As the move becomes imminent, Carter Kensal meets a British spy and his wife, Polly Blayden, who has nearly killed her husband and abandoned him in possession of a letter he has from his British commander which proves that he is a spy. I nlight of their lack of intimate relationships with their spouses, Jared Kensal and Polly Blayden are immediately attractedto each other. Polly asks to join Jared's wagon train so she can travel to Kentucky to visit her sister in Paris which was a tiny Central Kentucky village in 1794, the period in which the novel is set.
Jared has put together a massive wagon train for his trip to Kentucky, comprised of his family, an old Kentucky woodsman friend, Ab Caiton, about 65 slaves of all ages, a small detachment of militia whose purpose is to provide security for the group. He has a plan for taking the train across a route which is rarely used through what is now West Virginia, down the Little Kanawha River to the Ohio, and down the Ohio to Maysville, where they will go overland to Lexington through the area where in real life Daniel Boone and a party of his were engaged in the Battle of Blue Licks. Although Boone is a minor character in the novel, Blue Licks is never mentioned. The trip is an incredibly arduous effort requiring the hiring of mule skinners and ox drovers to drag the many wagons across mountains, the buying of several flat boats to haul the party, livestock, and plunder down the Ohio. It is a trip which most observers in the novel see as a doomed venture. But Jared Kensal and his team manage the feat as he and Polly fall in love, engage in a torrid affair along the way, and ends with battles with warring Indians along the Ohio, a final battle with Blayden himself, the death of Ardath Kensal.
Gene Markey was a devoted student of Kentucky history during his life as the husband of Lucille Wright Markey, the owner of famed Calumet Farm in Lexington. The book is well researched with a cast of purely fictional characters, and is well worth reading. It leaves a gap of several years between "Kentucky Pride" and "That Far Paradise". It is my belief that Gene Markey had intended to write a third novel to cover the gap between General Kensal's trip to Lexington and the Civil War and Reconstruction novel, "Kentucky Pride", which tells the story of his grandson who was a Confederate officer who returns to find his plantation in Lexington has been seized by the government due to his support of the Confederacy. I fully realize that many readers will dislike the novel because of the fact that General Kensal is a slaveholder and his Kentucky woodsman friend Ab Caiton hates Native Americans and scalps a few in the course of the novel. But it is my position that fiction which is labled as "historical fiction" has a serious responsibilty to accurately represent the times which it purports to describe. Any attempts to either ignore, rewrite, or misrepresent the history being portrayed is not historical fiction. It is simply fiction, inaccurate fiction, and not worthy of an intelligent reader's time.
