Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt Essay -- Midni

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was written by John Berendt and was 388 pages long. This was a non-fiction story of the beautiful town of Savannah, Georgia. John Berendt was a reporter who lived in New York and one night while dinning out he realized that one plate of food cost him the same amount of money that it would to fly to Savannah. So he did and he found himself in love with the city and stayed. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: a fading belle who packs a pistol in her dà ©colletage; a charming, piano-playing con man who moves like a hermit crab from one empty showplace house to the next, accompanied by his high-living entourage and pursued closely by his creditors; a moneyed dowager who conducts business from a cruising Mercedes limousine; a sour alcoholic inventor who claims to own a vial of poison so powerful that it could kill off the entire city; a voodoo priestess in purple shades; and a foul-mouthed black drag queen who passes so convincingly for a woman that she is able to extort abortion money from the parents of her white boyfriend. With these and other people from savannah, Berendt reviles his alliances and enemies in the town where everybody knows everybody else.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The exciting colorful town of Savannah is said to be the main character in this Novel, but the main character was actually John Berendt, he was the narrator and main character . He was a reporter from New York who made savannah and the people in Savannah his interest, his home, and his life. He learned all about this secluded city through observation, meetings, and gossip. He was an intelligent man who always knew where to be at the right time. There was this one scene in the book where he was having an interview with Jim Williams when Danny Hansford walked in, in a tirade, with a shirt on that said F-U on it. Well earlier that day his other friend Joe Oldem had been talking about this strange man who woke up in his bed with that same thing printed on his shirt. John was in the right place at the right time to put two and two together. Jim Williams was the other major character in this book, he was an antique dealer who owned one of the nicest homes in Savannah. He was a major ... ... job at it. The strongest features of the book was the way he described the people and the city as being one, The weakest part of the book was that the actually story of the murder didn’t start until the second part of the book. If I was the author I would probably incorporate more of the murder story line into the first part of the book and introduce the character’s throughout the whole book not just the first part ( the book was separated into a part 1 and part 2).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The ending of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was very satisfactory, Jim was found not guilty of Danny Hansfords’s death. Jim threw his first Christmas party of the year for the first time in 8 years, where he found himself remaking the guest list. Then at the very end he died, I believe that it was ideal for him to die, it was uncanny though that he died in the same place that he would of died 8 years ago if Danny had shot and killed him like he intended too. After Jim’s death Savannah was still the same. It was growing inward away from the real world, living in its own. The book starts with the town and ends with the town and I found that to be very satisfactory.