In his new novel, Madison Smartt Bell tackles the Confederacy's most controversial son, Nathan Bedford Forrest

Recent arrivals to Nashville may only know Nathan Bedford Forrest as the subject of a tacky monument that helps clutter the view as they drive south on I-65. But for many locals, the native Tennessean is a complicated and divisive figure—one who embodies both the noblest and ugliest aspects of the white South. Widely regarded as the Confederacy's finest military tactician, Forrest was the only man to enlist as a private and emerge at war's end as a lieutenant general. The Stars and Bars contingent admires him for his fearlessness in battle and his endearingly uncouth manner, and he was evidently magnanimous in defeat. But how to reconcile this Forrest with the one who presided over the horrific massacre of black Union troops during the Battle of Fort Pillow, made a fortune in the slave trade, and helped create the Ku Klux Klan?

It takes the emotional power and insight of fiction to get to the heart of such a complex character, and Madison Smartt Bell has accomplished that feat in his just-released novel, Devil's Dream. Bell is an ideal writer to take on the mythic, morally ambiguous Forrest. Born and raised in Nashville, he is probably best known for his epic trilogy of novels on the Haitian revolution All Souls' Rising, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone that the Builder Refused. He has always had an arms-length relationship to his identity as a Southern writer, but his roots show in his displaced Southern characters, his thematic obsessions with religion and race, and his lush way with language. He has an instinctive understanding of the conflicting currents in the South's collective psyche.

Bell is also a master at sifting through the nuances of larger-than-life characters, as evidenced by his portrait of Haiti's liberator, Toussaint Louverture. Like Forrest, Louverture had been eclipsed by his legend over the years, and Bell humanized him, transforming the vengeful, godlike being of myth into a complex and courageous man who met a poignant end. Though Forrest inhabits a lesser pantheon than Louverture, his legend begs the same deconstruction, which Bell delivers. The Forrest of Devil's Dream is a merciless warrior who loves women, weapons and horses—not necessarily in that order—but he's also a man of deep feeling, and not without qualms about the heinous system he fights to sustain.

The author is scheduled to appear at a book signing for Devil's Dream at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 7 p.m. Nov. 20. On the occasion of Bell's new novel, the Scene corresponded with the acclaimed novelist about the genesis of Devil's Dream, the historical research and attitudes that went into the book, and the mass of contradictions that is its subject.

Q Scene: Growing up in Middle Tennessee, you must have heard stories about Nathan Bedford Forrest. Was he a figure of fascination for you then? How was his legend presented to you?

A Madison Smartt Bell: On the Mississippi side of my family there's a story about a little girl born toward the end of the Civil War. Story goes, during those hard times, the family didn't get around to giving her a name. Sounds far-fetched but not out of the question that they might have just called her "Sis" or something for a few years until she got big enough to think she needed a better name than that. She looked about for somebody important and so named herself Forrest because it was a powerful name, thus becoming forever and aye my great (great-great?) Aunt Forrest.

That gives you some idea of Forrest's prestige in the South at the time of the war's end. He seems to have been, at that point, unequivocally admired in the region, although before the war the planter aristocracy wouldn't have wanted to let him in the house, due to his rough frontier manners and the fact that he was a slave trader.

I read (and still possess) one of that series of little orange biographies of American heroes that were all over in the early '60s—Bedford Forrest: Boy on Horseback, I believe it is called. I enjoyed it at the time but don't remember much about it. Those books were all sorta the same, it seems to me now.

When I was in my 20s I read Andrew Lytle's work on Forrest: Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company, and the substantial parts on Forrest in A Wake for the Living. I also got to hear Mr. Lytle talk about Forrest from time to time. Lytle saw Forrest as representative and a hero of what he called the Southern "yeoman"—that is, the small freeholders who worked a good deal with their own hands and owned few slaves if any. Forrest fits this description to the extent that he was a frontiersman during his youth, and very much a self-made man. Lytle's sense that Forrest ran his fighting force as if it were a sort of extended family has some influence on Devil's Dream.

Toussaint Louverture and Nathan Bedford Forrest were both brilliant fighters, both men who seemed to relish violence. Is there something about the character of the warrior that particularly engages you?