This novel completes—and adds a great deal of depth to—Andrew Krivak’s stunning and award-winning Dardan Trilogy. Covering the life of Jozef Vinich and his two grandsons, Bo and Sam Konar, these three books—The Sojourn (2011), The Signal Flame (2017), and Like the Appearance of Horses (2023)—state their themes with frankness and power, cover their very memorable characters with charity and clarity both, and exhibit a rare, an ineffable, art, worth every moment you would devote to them. Andrew Krivak deserves the awards which have greeted his marvelous writing.
Like the Appearance of Horses takes its title from the second chapter of the Book of Joel, in a passage describing the unstoppable rush of an army that lays waste to the land. This quote enunciates the principal theme of the three books supremely well. War unites this family in heroism, devastating loss, and in tempering the character of all whom it touches.
This novel belongs chiefly to Sam Konar, Jozef Vinich’s second grandson, who, after a series of misadventures (chiefly, engaging in one too many drag races in his hemi head hot rod) is directed by the authorities that his only alternative is to enlist (in the mid-60s) in the Armed Forces.
What follows fills much of the book. Sam does two tours in Vietnam from ‘66 to ’72, near the end of which he is captured and winds up in the notorious North Vietnamese prison dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. There he is forcibly turned into a heroin addict by a creepy NVA prison guard, and must live by his wits—and extemporize from heroin fix to heroin fix—as he gains his freedom and returns Stateside. Throughout this ordeal, Sam retains his principles, even with their altered focus, and eventually reunites with his battalion commander from when he was in country.
In some ways Sam hoes the most difficult row of any of Krivak’s characters. Within the narrative, his experience wraps up the soldiering history of the Vinich and Konar men. Krivak treats Sam’s heroic re-emergence from addiction and imprisonment with blunt realism and steady sympathy. It is a harrowing, but rewarding, element of the novel, perhaps the book’s most important.
The Dardan trilogy will stay with me forever. Its beautiful prose, its comprehensive insider’s treatment of the natural world, and its oh-so-compelling characters make it a unique achievement. Take these books up and let yourself be carried along by a master.
The Signal Flame is Andrew Krivak’s 2017 second entry in the Dardan Trilogy, after a fictional town in Pennsylvania, the stories’ home setting. Signal Flame shares the last events of the multigenerational saga with the third book, Like the Appearance of Horses (2023). The overarching story traces the remarkable life of Jozef Vinich, who fought for the Austro-Hungarians in the Great War, and through hard work, guts, and brains, eventually came into ownership of a sawmill in Dardan, one of the town’s main employers. Please note, the events of this family’s lives, while vivid and dramatic, do not in themselves make the story remarkable. It is the character, abilities, honesty, and strength of the main characters, and in particular the men, which do so.
The second book, The Signal Flame, features Bo Konar, the elder of Jozef Vinich’s two grandsons. After his father dies, Bo spends his childhood at his grandfather’s side and he learns not only the practical lessons of working a farm and tracking game, but also the wisdom and strength of character only available from someone like Jozef. Bo leaves college after only one semester; the shock of the accidental death of a fellow student with whom he was falling in love, moors him to home. At home in Dardan he begins his career at the sawmill, an operation he will eventually own. Events swirl around him and his family: his father is accidentally killed in a hunting accident in 1949 (when Bo is 8 years old); in the 1960s a flood crashes through the town and Bo acts in a superhuman way, jumping from a bridge into a raging, overflowing river, to save the woman who is pregnant with his niece.
Through it all, the stalwart virtues of honesty, level-headedness, receptiveness, fairness, and worldly wisdom carry the main characters, Jozef and Bo particularly, but also the Catholic priest who provides practical help and succor to the family, and Hannah, Bo’s mother, who grieves the loss of her husband. As a follow-up to 2011’s The Sojourn, The Signal Flame fits supremely well, which is a grand recommendation on its own. It continues the clarity and sturdiness of the prose, the gratifying virtuousness of the main characters, and even the non-essential characters have their full human traits, foibles, beliefs, and skills.
This second book in the trilogy is a worthy entry; it stands on its own if you want to immerse yourself in this part of the story, but my recommendation is to start with the memorable and inspiring (and award-winning) The Sojourn. It’s just a book you should not neglect. And neither is The Signal Flame.
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