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Charles Frazier's first novel, Cold Mountain (1997), about the Homeric journey home of a Confederate deserter in the American Civil War, was snapped up by Hollywood and turned into an Oscar-winning film. His second novel, Thirteen Moons (Sceptre, £11.99), published this month, earned him a reputed advance of £4m. Writing, as a business, doesn't get much better than this.
Still, Frazier has earned his indentures. The former university lecturer from North Carolina was well into his forties before he struck literary gold, and the one thing you cannot fault him for is his erudition. What you would not necessarily expect from an academic is an ability to tell a story with panache. But Thirteen Moons, like Cold Mountain, is airport fodder of the highest quality.
Thirteen Moons tells of the fate of the Cherokee Indians in the 19th century, from the point of view of Will, a white orphan sent out to man a trade outpost in the southern Appalachians, who is adopted by a Cherokee chieftain, Bear.
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Charles Frazier knows how to do the business, says tim auld
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The Cherokee are facing eviction from their territory, but Will makes good, buys vast tracts of land, and, together with Bear, attempts to build a private domain for the Indians who refuse to bow to Washington and move west (it's Schindler's List in the Deep South).
Will also falls in love with a mercurial girl, Claire, who flits between offering him decorative sex in picturesque locations and vanishing cruelly without a word of farewell.
The romance is touching; the Cherokee story fascinating (Will's narrative is based upon the true story of William Holland Thomas); and there are resonant but not overbearing messages about the making of modern America.
However, Frazier is no prose master: his writing is at times too obviously a pitch to some Hollywood producer, and at others just painfully wordy. And, as is often the case with such novels, I wish that he had had a bit more faith in fact and written the biography behind the fiction. 
FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 23, 2006
 Last week: Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal
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