"March"

by Geraldine Brooks

When Geraldine Brooks sits down to write a novel, she must be surrounded by stacks of research. I came to "March", a Pulitzer Prize winner, after reading a later Brook's novel "People of the Book". One of the pleasures of reading "People of the Book" was finding historical flashbacks replete with fascinating details drawn from Brook's research.

It is a major accomplishment of writing to keep a fictional narrative moving while dependent on factual events to frame a story. No writer that comes to mind masters this art better than Geraldine Brooks in my reading experience. I wasn't disappointed to discover the time of The Civil War brought to life in March with historical felicity elevating the story the author vividly imagines.

Jo said sadly, "We haven't a father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never", but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.
--Louisa May Alcottt, Little Women

Only an absent father in Alcott's story that remains focused on Marmee, and the March daughter's Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy, Geraldine Brooks lets us follow the idealistic Mr. March as he becomes a chaplain in the Union Army during the dark first year of the American Civil War. He is immediately involved in a disastrous defeat and near death in the chaos of a rout and retreat trying to reach safety on the far shore of the Potomac River.

It is just the beginning of experiences that will challenge the ideals shared with his Concord neighbors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. When Mr. March manages to escape the pursuing Rebels, he stumbles, exhausted up a road, and is halfway up the "wide stone steps" of a house before he recognized that he had been there before.

Twenty years before, Mr. March was a "lean and strong" young man walking the same road to the same house, then a prosperous Southern manse. He was a Yankee pedlar, carrying two trunks of goods that he planned to sell to the wealthy plantation owners. But his ambition would be stayed by encountering Augustus Clement, the master of the manse and his elegant, beautiful slave, Grace. The events during his stay with Clement would change his life, and echo down the rest the years described in March.

In Brooks telling, we learn about a fortune made and lost by Mr. March after his marriage to Marmee, and his life with his "little women" before he departs as an army volunteer. He will come home,after recovery in a Washington hospital with Marmee, and be embraced by Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy, but only as a man changed by the horrors of war.

Reviewed by Don Mac Brown