The Stone That the Builder Refused

The Stone that the Builder Refused is the final volume of Madison Smartt Bell’s masterful trilogy about the Haitian Revolution–the first successful slave revolution in history–which begins with All Souls' Rising (a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award) and continues with Master of the Crossroads.  Each of these three novels can be read independently of the two others; of the trilogy, The Baltimore Sun has said, “[It] will make an indelible mark on literary history–one worthy of occupying the same shelf as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”

Following the widely acclaimed All Souls’ Rising and Master of the Crossroads, Madison Smartt Bell gives us the climactic final chapter in the life of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the only successful slave revolution in history.

In 1791, what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. By 1793 Toussaint had emerged as the leader of the revolt, proving himself to be as adept at politics as he was on the battlefield. By 1801 he had succeeded in stabilizing the war-ravaged territory and invited exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and reclaim their properties. The foundation of a society based on liberty, genuine equality, and brotherhood among whites, blacks, and mulattos seemed in place. But the proclamation of a new constitution that abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint governor for life incited Napoleon to dispatch troops in order to reestablish control over the island.

The Stone That the Builder Refused spans the final phase of Toussaint’s career and paints an astonish-ingly detailed and riveting portrait of a new society breaking forth from the chrysalis of a revolution, of the vision that impelled Toussaint to create a society based on principle and idealism, and of the dreadful compromises he was forced to make in order to
preserve it.

A masterly weave of the factual and the imagined, this grand culmination of Bell’s landmark Toussaint Louverture trilogy stands alone as a towering achievement of historical fiction.

The New York Times - Michael Pye

The scale alone is extraordinary. But any fool can write 2,000 pages; that just takes time. What is truly impressive is the energy and concentration, right to the very end. Almost every moment is full, like some great narrative painting, alive with the detail that puts you on the road or in the house where some murder or meeting is about to happen. And almost every moment is imagined thoroughly … As fiction, these books do what novels are meant to do: they propose their own vivid and inexorable history.

Whether he's writing about the Haitian Revolution or a white Tae Kwon Do teacher in the Baltimore ghetto, Madison Smartt Bell can be extraordinarily flexible while maintaining his simple but poetic way with language. As the New York Times Book Review once put it, "[Bell] has an uncanny understanding of the way many people must struggle to live."