Published in 1948,  this is regarded by some as Faulkner’s masterpiece. Any modern reader, picking up a Faulkner novel for the first time needs to adapt quickly to his style; either that, or put the book back on the shelf. Be prepared for long paragraphs with minimal punctuation. This, in 1948 was, of course, nothing new. Writers as diverse as Proust and Joyce had written in what became known as the “stream of  consciousness” style. You will also need to be alert and follow the text closely to understand who is speaking. You will rarely find anything as obvious as “Grant said,” or “Mother replied,”.

The novel is set in the fictional  town of Jefferson, within Yoknapatapha County. It is almost certainly based on the city of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived for much of his life. He has little in common with Thomas Hardy, except that both men drew maps of the area where their novels were set, Hardy’s, of course, being of Dorset and its surrounds. We can date the action in the novel fairly accurately, as one of the characters refers to ‘the atom bomb’ which would only become public knowledge after August 1945.

The main character is a teenage boy called Charles ‘Chick’ Mallison. He comes from a very respectable and well-to-do white family. Early in the story, he is out fishing with some other boys, when he falls into the creek. His friends try to get him out, but he is then rescued by an austere black man called Lucas Beauchamp. Their early relationship is established when, after being taken to Beauchamp’s cabin to dry out, Charles attempts to pay the man for food he has been given. Beauchamp throws the money to the ground.

A couple of years later, Beauchamp is arrested for shooting dead a local white man called Vinson Gowrie whose kinsmen are all criminals. It is fully expected that at some point, Gowrie’s relatives will storm the jail and lynch the prisoner. Charles’s uncle is Gavin Stevens, the county attorney and, in true lawyer fashion, he has no particular position on whether or not Lucas did kill Gowrie, but is more concerned with matters of proof and evidence.

Charles is friends with a young black boy called Aleck Sander, son of the woman who cooks for the the Mallison family, and he was with Charles when Lucas rescued him from the creek. Charles goes to talk with Lucas in the jail, and is persuaded to go and dig up the coffin of the recently buried Gowrie, because Lucas is sure that a proper examination will show that the man was not killed by a bullet from Lucas’s old revolver, but with something of a different calibre. It is at this point that Faulkner introduces the character of Eunice Habersham, a rather eccentric and elderly white woman who keeps chickens. She is a descendant of one of the early settlers in the county; she is thin and apparently frail, but made of stern stuff. She has a truck, and with Charles’s horse Highboy in tow, they go out to the remote graveyard and dig up the coffin.

What happens next is for you to find out. This book may be 77 years old and a classic of literature, but it has many of the elements of a crime thriller, and reviewers – even amateurs like me – never give the game away. I will be neither the first nor the last to point out the similarity between this novel and the best-seller that came out 12 years later, which also featured a black man unjustly accused of a crime, with the events viewed through the eyes of a white teenager. Suffice it to say that the two novels have different endings, but both reflect on racial injustice in the American South, although Faulkner’s book is set decades after that of Harper Lee.

The full glory of Intruder In The Dust is the poetic language encased in prose, albeit prose of an unconventional nature. I have referred elsewhere to Faulkner’s majestic words describing the faint hope that if a Southern boy squeezes his eyes closed and holds his breath, Pickett’s charge might never have happened or had a different outcome. There is, however, more. So much more. Here, he describes the atmosphere within the black community of Jefferson waiting for the inevitable raid by the Gowries in the town jail, and the immolation of Lucas Beauchamp.

“But not now, not tonight:  where in town except for Paralee and Aleck Sander, he had seen none either for twenty four hours but he had expected that, they were acting exactly as Negroes and whites both would have expected Negroes to act at such a time; they were still there, they had not fled,  you just didn’t see them – a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered houses,  not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear:  just waiting, biding, since theirs was an armament which the white man could not match nor –  if he but knew it, even cope with  patience;  just keeping out of sight and out of the way.”

It is one of the great ironies of modern sensibilities that if an unknown writer presented this manuscript to a modern publishing house, it would certainly be rejected. It’s all about words and language, obviously. Regarding the current debate over the capitalisation of the word Black and its obverse, in this review and elsewhere I have avoided capitals in both cases.