Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina (Norton: $10.95; 277 pp.)

Ibelieve I am correct in saying that critical consensus has named James Still’s “River of Earth” and John Yount’s “Hardcastle” as the classic novels about coal mining in the southern Appalachian mountains. To these titles must now be added Denise Giardina’s “Storming Heaven.” It is a brilliant diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, heartwarming, tough and tender.

Giardina has written a historical novel about the Battle of Blair Mountain, which occurred in West Virginia in 1921, when 10,000 striking miners attempted to take control of the corrupt governments of two counties. After valiant bloody struggle with local and state police and with mine guards paid by the coal companies, the miners lost their battle when President Warren G. Harding sent in the Army. The Army used poison gas against the workers and bombed them from airplanes. The mine guards--who were mostly criminals from Chicago and called “gun thugs” by the mountaineers--killed strikers and their children indiscriminately and often raped the women before murdering them too.

A reader is likely to come away from “Storming Heaven” in a fury of helpless indignation, but this is no propaganda novel. Its finest ambitions are artistic, and it is hard to see that it has any political aims at all except the ancient and honorable one of discovering injustice and holding it up to the pitiless witness of history.

And its artistic ambitions are beautifully vindicated. The story begins in 1890, “two years before the land was give out from under us to the coal company,” as one of the characters puts it. This speaker is C. J. Marcum, a native proto-Socialist who becomes a mayor; he is one of the four narrators who tell the story. The others are Rondal Lloyd (a.k.a. Rondal Justice), a miner who becomes a union organizer; Carrie Bishop, a courageous and intelligent mountain girl who becomes a nurse and, despite herself, a union activist, and Rosa Angelelli, an Italian immigrant who works as housekeeper for one of the mine owners.

So then, we have three decades of social upheaval revealed by four narrators in 277 pages. If this stringent economy gives the book a wounding impact, it also necessitates that much of the historical material must be treated by implication and in secondhand report. There is little attempt in “Storming Heaven” to delineate broad social currents or to deal with the strike as a mass movement in the manner of Zola or the Russian novelists. Giardina’s emphasis is upon the individual characters.

In fact, one of the most surprising things about her treatment is that she has set her historical political novel in the context of a love story about Rondal Lloyd and Carrie Bishop. It is a tragic story of one-sided love--Rondal is so single-mindedly attached to his union ideals that he refuses to return Carrie’s fierce devotion--but it is still a love story. If only--we feel--if only there weren’t such terrible turmoil about the coal mines, such anguish and brutality, Rondal and Carrie would have lives together as flamboyantly romantic as those of Catherine and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights,” Carrie’s favorite book.

“Storming Heaven” is highly romantic; it is only not sentimental. Giardina’s stratagem of making her labor novel a love story points up a fruitful tension that is present in the best novels about this material. The splendid setting of the dramatically beautiful Southern mountains and the inherent lyricism of the characters’ speech and the author’s style are always in hard contrast to the ugly unforgivable facts of the case. Always these two visions of reality collide and grind against one another.

Here, for example, is Rondal’s first entrance into a mine as a child laborer. The contrast between two landscapes, between two complexes of emotion, is sharp, but not overstated:

It wasn’t really light outside. But the weeds had smelled strong and green in the spring dew, mourning doves and meadowlarks had cried for the sun to rise, and a breeze ruffled the fine hair at the nape of my neck. Now there was no movement of air except the unnatural breath of the trap doors opening and closing inside the tunnels. The smell was like the inside of our coal stove, but damp and decaying. Ahead of us, lamps bobbed like monstrous lightning bugs. . . . I felt the the mountain hunkered over us, pressing down, and it was hard to breathe.

This tension between the hard facts about survival and an inherent lyricism is pretty much a constant in Appalachian literature, even when coal mining is not its subject. The poetry of Robert Morgan displays the same sharp contrast, and “The Time of Man,” Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ magnificent novel, is probably the exemplar of the style.

Most readers tend to think of all literature produced below the Mason-Dixon line as “Southern,” a single homogenous molasses flood. But Appalachian writers, especially those in the newly rejuvenated Appal Lit movement, resent the “Southern” label. The Southern culture and the mountain are distinctly separate, with differing backgrounds, concerns, and goals. Southern mountaineers have been a despised breed. Even the labor movement, so boastful of its tolerance toward social and ethnic groups, despised them, as one of Giardina’s characters discovers when he visits the labor headquarters in Chicago. “One thing I found out,” he says, “they don’t know about us down here and they don’t give a damn. Even the socialists. To them we’re just a passel of ignorant hillbillies. Anything we do will be done by our own selves.”

If there could be a motto to express the true spirit of our Appalachian mountain folk, that phrase might be it: “By our own selves.”