Firedamp

Rating:
Summary: Firedamp by Ben Zeller
Review: Firedamp, Ben Zeller's second novel, is fast moving, often brilliant and always engrossing. Firedamp (a miner's term for the deadly, flammable methane gas generated in underground coal mines) is unsurpassed in its touching honesty, originality and pathos. The narrative flows easily. The characters are fully developed.
Firedamp is set in the late eighteen/early nineteen hundreds, a time in history of the inflammatory miners revolution in the coal-rich territory surrounding Trinidad, Colorado and Raton, New Mexico. Zeller, a resident of Raton, obviously spent months searching out the facts of the unprecedented and avoidable mine disasters of that time and area. But let me state up front, this is not a boring history book. This is a novel of legends, power, bigotry, immense greed, ignorance, knowledge, raw sex, passionate love and intimate understanding. It spans the continent of Europe, from which many of the characters originate, and continues across the United States. The novel is honed by a sharp sense of earthy philosophy. Mr. Zeller is a master storyteller.

From the back cover: "In 1880, Charles Winslow, railroad baron, rancher, industrialist, stakes out a vast kingdom on the wild Colorado/New Mexico border." ... taking advantage of cheep labor of the time ... "He railroads in thousands of poor immigrants to mine his rich underground coal deposits: among them, Leos Nemcova."

Falsely accused of murder, explosive expert, Nemcova, flees the coalfields of Bohemia for the United States where jobs are plentiful, promises golden and few questions asked. Waiting furtively for weeks for cheep passage at the German port of Hamburg he encounters a darkly beautiful Angelina Frederica. Wrapped in heavy winter robes, to mask her unwanted pregnancy, the lady (herself on the run) desperately needs cover and money for passage. She bewitches the big Slovack convincing him to marry her and pay her passage. Insisting the union not be consummated until their arrival in "her new world" she leads him aboard the steamer, Yankee Passage. They arrive in New York in the brutal arms of the blizzard of 1888. On the cold earth floor of an immigration warehouse Angelina gives birth. She leaves the tiny, prematurely born boy in the helpless arms of the powder man. Her son is the novel's chief catalyst.
Arriving at the Trinadad coal mines the baby is discovered in his presumed father's carpetbag. Winslow, a widower, takes the boy to the ranch and raises him with his son and daughter of the same age.
As the children cross the threshold of puberty explicit awkward yet touchingly sensitive sexual scenes depict the growing love of the young Leos Nemcova and Sarah Winslow, his adopted sister. His unknown and unmentioned mother, Angelina Frederica, sexually molested at the age of twelve by her Prussian father, desperately searches "her new world" for love. She finds it with Megan Cooper, the wife of a wealthy sea captain.

"In her dressing room that morning, the person who touched her was not a man wanting to crawl over her body like an army on the march ... It excited her. Megan's touch had been exacting. Her fingers were precise and understanding..."

When the older Megan is taken from her by cancer, the distraught Freddy plunges into the business she inherits. She whips her company, Cooper's Sea, into a multi million-dollar enterprise. Her own fortune now secured, she branches out buying into other business, always with her golden touch. Unwittingly, she became embroiled in the dwindling fortune of the Winslow Mine Co. There, she meets Sarah. Frederica falls in love for the second time in her life. This time, however, she is the older woman. And Sarah is the adopted sister of her unknown son..
Firedamp follows the lives of these and other fictitious and historical characters from the brothels and coalmines of Europe to the rocky mountain peaks of Colorado. The novel resolves in a people's revolution that moved the world with its explosive conclusion: The Ludlow Massacre.
Although the author does not stick strictly to the historic facts of the case, history adds a frost of reality to the cold truth he portrays. Many of the players in this vividly constructed novel are true figures of the time. The main characters, however, are drawn from the author's imagination and that imagination builds a masterpiece that will hold you to the final word ... It will keep you thinking for weeks to come.

You won't put this book down. Firedamp is a novel like Gone With The Wind. It is not a throwaway. It will be read again and again.