The March (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper)) [Large Print] (Hardcover)

If you simply read history books about the Civil War, it becomes a sort of sanitized tale of good and evil.

The reality was far more interesting. West Point classmates opposed each other as generals. Brothers and cousins fought on opposing sides. Although there was a draft in the North, you could hire a substitute to serve for you.

This was also the first modern war where engines of mass destruction could wreck havoc over large distances. With little in the way of medicine to deal with the slaughter, disease was often more fatal than cannons and rifles. Any injury to an extremity was usually dealt with my amputation (with little or no anesthetic) to avoid gangrene in the unhygienic conditions.

As the war drew to a close, tactics changed. Instead of treating an advance like it was going through one's own country, Northern troops under Sherman lived off the land and the people they found there after capturing Atlanta as they first marched to the sea and then headed north through the Carolinas.

The March covers the aftermath of the battle of Atlanta through to the war's conclusion from the perspective of the troops under Sherman.

Mr. Doctorow has assembled a fascinating cast of historical and fictional characters to build a complex tapestry of the interactions that actually took place. As such, his fiction attains an eternal truth much like War and Peace captures the Napoleonic Wars in a way makes them understandable to us today.

As I read the book, I couldn't help comparing it to The Red Badge of Courage and found that Doctorow succeeded in a similar way to what Stephen Crane accomplished . . . but on a larger scale.

Several of the characters will stay with you after you put the book down. One is a former slave, Pearl, who escapes from her plantation to follow the soldiers. I cannot remember a new fictional character I enjoyed reading about this year as much as I did about Pearl. The bizarrely injured Albion Smith also provides much food for thought. Arly and Will provide comic relief (much like the gravediggers in Hamlet) while demonstrating the vicissitudes of conflict and how ordinary desires rise to the surface in times of strife to create unexpected results.

The March also is significant and memorable for its portrayal of the insanities of war . . . insanities we should remember when we start thinking about imposing our will on others.

The March succeeds both at the large and the small levels. I only felt like the book faltered in a few places where surgeon Colonel Wade Sartorius speculated about ways to improve medicine that seemed far too advanced for 1864.

I also appreciated what seemed to be an intended irony in having a Northern surgeon from Europe bear a name very similar to the Sartoris family of the Faulkner novels.

If you read only one serious novel this fall, I recommend this one.

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Through a series of dramatic vignettes, Doctorow reveals the characters' family lives and stimulates reader interest. Mattie Jameson, the wife of a cruel slaveowner, has closed her eyes to the horrors of slavery, but when her estate is burned, her husband killed, and her 14- and 15-year-old sons conscripted to fight for the Confederacy, she has nowhere else to go. Pearl, whom Mattie describes as "that horrible child," is the mulatto child of her husband John Jameson and one of his slaves, and Pearl, too, becomes a marcher, disguised at a drummer boy.

Emily Thompson, the elegant daughter of a Georgia Supreme Court Justice, helps Dr. Wrede Sartorius, a Union regimental surgeon, renowned "for removing a leg in twelve seconds [without anesthesia]. An arm took only nine." Two turncoats, the devious Arly and the naïve Will, serve as the primary comic relief, opportunistically trading uniforms to suit their circumstances.

Real people mix with fictional characters, giving life to the narrative and a sense of immediacy to the action. General Sherman--"Uncle Billy," to the troops--is the unifying element of the novel, and he comes to life, his own family suffering as much personal hardship as the families he meets on the march. Cameos of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln enhance the conclusion of the novel, and even Coalhouse Walker makes an appearance. The cast of characters is fluid, with some characters disappearing during the narrative, as they would in reality. Doctorow's eye for detail and ability to convey sense impressions--a severed leg so heavy it has to be carried by two people, or a soldier catching an enemy on his bayonet and being unable to shake it free--create both an atmosphere and the harsh realities of war.

Focusing on the march itself, Doctorow explores broad themes--the human costs of this war and its aftermath throughout the South: the thousands of displaced people, the loss of traditional ways of life, the economic disasters, the cultural shocks, the lack of opportunities for freed slaves, and their need to be taught how to be free. Showing the terrible universality of war, Gen. Sherman notes, "our civil war..is but a war after a war, a war before a war." Mary Whipple

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In a recent discussion about "The March" Doctorow stated that he intended to give the book a "Russian feel". In that he has succeeded. The broad canvas painted by Doctorow, a multitude of characters (both real and fictional) who meet, interact, and depart while war is waged all around them does contain stark similarities to Leo Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, and Vasily Grossman. Doctorow's unique voice and style allows him to impart this "Russian" flavor to a novel about the Civil War without it seeming imitative or derivative. The March is an original and entertaining piece of work.

There are a host of characters in the book. Some, like Sherman, appears throughout. Others, who shall remain nameless, make an impact on the reader and advance the story but suffer untimely fates. As with any war untimely deaths are the rule rather than the exception. The other major characters include: Pearl, a newly freed slave who father was her former plantation master; Colonel Wrede Sartorius, a German born army surgeon; Arly and Will, two Confederate soldiers whose appearance and reappearance in Union and Confederate uniforms is both amusing and ultimately suspenseful; Stephen Walsh, a Union soldier who finds himself spending a lot of time with Pearl; and Emily Thompson, a southern woman who ends up as a nurse to Dr. Sartorious.

Doctorow devotees will recognize Dr. Sartorious as the evil Dr. Sartorius featured in Waterworks. They will also recognize the freed slave Coalhouse Walker as the father of jazz pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. from Ragtime. These 'coincidences' are not central to the plot but does engage the reader with background information about the characters not readily apparent from the reading.

The book progresses along with Sherman's march. We see southern cities burnt down at the least sign of resistance and we see captured Union soldiers executed without cause. War is indeed hell and the havoc of war is omnipresent. Doctorow is unstinting of his portraits of all his characters be they northern or southern. There is no such thing as a romantic hero; there is simply brutality in the name of survival and accommodation to the dogs of war barking at everyone's feet.

One noticeable element of The March is the easy transformation of the characters into different versions of themselves. Will and Arly's rapid changes are the most evident of them. So too is Pearl's transformation from a timid slave girl into a Union drummer boy and then a nurse. All around the novel such changes abound. The war, for all its brutality, provides many of the characters in the novel with the freedom to change themselves and society's perception of them. The boxes to which we are consigned are put aside and we are then free to create our own version of ourselves free from a peacetime society's constraints.

The novel ends as the war ends. The end of the novel is as ambiguous as the end of the war itself. There is certain optimism that freedom (whether from slavery or society's pigeonholing) gained will not be lost once the fog of war lifts. The reader may know better than the characters how unfounded that optimism was but the characters do not and their naïve hopes makes them all the more poignant.

The March is a fine book.

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