Amazing book---probably the best use of the “God’s-eye” narrator I’ve read. The story zips back and forth through time, as if the narrator sees all of history all at once, rather like the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five. One character could be whittling a doll for his daughter, and the story would suddenly zoom at the end of the daughter’s life, the doll still there with her. Combined with the literary forgeries of historical texts scattered throughout the story, the wide expanse of time gives the book a stately air of verisimilitude, even if the characters and settings (e.g. Manchester County is not actually a county in Virginia) are wholly invented.
Another thing that stuck to me besides the inventive narration is the everyday cruelty of slavery. There is the master who cut the ear of a runaway so badly that the runaway died; there’s the patrollers kidnapping and selling Augustus. Only when characters from the north (e.g. Winifred) make comments does the text acknowledge the barbarity of the peculiar institution.
The treatment of race in the book is interesting, especially of course the status of the Townsends, black people who own other black people. Caldonia’s being anxious about her affair with Moses, where she wonders if it’s miscegenation even though both of them are black, belies a materialist account of race: to be white is to have dominion and ownership over those who are black. So, in owning Moses, she sees herself as white.