Generally if I should finish a book I'm reading on the morning train ride, my lunch that afternoon involves a trip to the store to find something new. Finishing a book on the ride home however is a little trickier, as this leaves me emptyhanded for the next morning. It is in these situations that I end up grabbing something from the shelf to tide me over. Such was the case the other day when I grabbed "All Souls' Rising," the first book in Madison Smartt Bell's trilogy of historical fiction novels about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution.

I have a love/hate relationship with historical fiction as a genre. On the one hand, the idea of putting words into someone's mouth strikes me as hokey and unnecessary. My life in archives and libraries has taught me that if anything, the real story is often so interesting as to need no added characterization. On the other hand, books like Shaara's The Killer Angels and even arguably A Tale of Two Cities played a major role in getting me into history during my formative years.

I guess what I like most about All Souls' Rising is that Bell uses the island of Haiti (nee Saint-Domingue) itself as a character. It is not merely the setting or the background, but an active force in the plot. I think you see this type of thing a lot more in films because it's easier to pull off with some type of visual (Gone Baby Gone and There Will be Blood are two stellar examples from recent memory).

Unfortunately the trilogy loses quite a bit of steam as it heads into the second book, and by the third merely plods to its conclusion. But All Souls' Rising is one of the most visceral pieces of fiction I've ever read that somehow manages to boil a major historical event down to the ground level. All the more amazing considering the event took place over 200 years ago.