A Review of Fire Bells in the Night

Geoffrey Edwards’ Fire Bell in the Night, the antebellum novel that won  an unexpected second prize in Gather.com’s First Chapters Competition, is prefaced with a quote from a letter by Thomas Jefferson in April 1820, six years before his death. Fearful of the consequences of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Jefferson wrote, “But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union."

Edwards’ novel begins in April 1850 with a heart-stopping prologue  that introduces the reader to the horror of slavery: a slave child in Georgia is murdered; slaves who knew and loved him rebel; the slaveowners’ family is murdered. The novel proper begins about three months later.

It’s a long novel, not as long as Gone With the Wind, maybe about the same size as The Confessions of Nat Turner. These are great novels to compare to a debut, but Edwards takes on great themes in Firebells.

The drama moves from Georgia to Charleston, South Carolina, the city where war will break out 11 years later. In the first two chapters we see the lynched body of a young black man, the murder of a New York City reporter,  and the arrival of the novel’s protagonist, young John Sharp, the reporter who will now cover the trial of a white man accused of  aiding a fugitive slave.

Throughout the novel firebells ring, fueling the ominous and oppressive feelings of terror, humidity and heat that Sharp and the reader feel.