The Biblio Blogazine

March by Geraldine Brooks (2005)
Historical Fiction, 304 pages
Penguin Books

About the Book:
As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the American Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.

From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war leaving his wife and daughters. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In Brooks’ telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism.

From the vibrant intellectual world of New England and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s tale and portrays the moral complexity of war, a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism, and by the temptations of a powerful forbidden attraction.

The setting of this novel is during the same period as its inspiration, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. However except for several chapters, it is from the point of view of Mr. March, their absent father during much of Alcott’s book.

March is an idealistic man; so much so, he becomes a staunch vegetarian early in life and chooses to be a chaplain and abolitionist as an adult. As hard as he tries to remain steadfast to his vocation and causes, he discovers a harsh truth: that with such ideals comes a certain naivety, which has left him woefully unprepared for the battles that assail him from without, and within, during one of the most tumultuous times in United States history.

As he becomes experienced in war, we see him begin to reflect on his idealism, what it means, and where it is leading him:

I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end. It was, I see now, the rehearsal of the great argument that has brought me to these wintery ridges, at this grim time…How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor.

Later he states his anguish more clearly at seeing a part of him dying, replaced by someone unsure and questioning his decisions:

One day I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he was meant to do.

As stated in this novel’s introduction:

When he first enlisted, March was an idealistic man. He knew, above all else, that fighting this war for the Union cause was right and just. But he had not expected he would begin a journey through hell on earth, where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, were too often blurred.

The author does an amazing job showing her readers March’s struggle throughout the book with trying to keep those lines from blurring. He feels he fails miserably, and can find no way to reconcile what he was and what the war has left him.

It is not until he hears the words of a former slave, who through most of her life knew only degradation and suffering, that he sees a glimpse of hope of finding his way home again, morally and literally:

I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to do the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way.

March does survive and returns home. But he, his marriage, and his perception have changed. In an interview, the author was asked about the passage I quoted above and whether she felt that March could return to what he was, which is what I wondered after finishing the book. I like her answer:

I don’t think he can go back. Nor do I think it is necessarily desirable. Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own. By the end of the book, March is damaged, but he is still an idealist; it’s just that he sees more clearly the cost of his ideals, and understands that he is not the only one who must pay for them.

I could not summarize it any better.

Some may take issue with some of the historical incidents and the timing of said events, however one must remember this is a novel, a fictionalized account, written about a man caught up in the times in which he lived, not of the times themselves.

Another point to bring up is the style and language used. It must be remembered this is written as a parallel novel to Little Women and as such its tone will match closely to the one used by Alcott. Thus at times, the reader, if not familiar, or comfortable with late 19^th century style writing, may find the story a little difficult to traverse at times.

I don’t feel that reading Alcott’s book is a requirement before reading Brooks. However, if you have not read either, why not have both novels handy and read one right after the other thus giving you the full effect and beauty of both writers.

This is a book I would highly recommend, however I am not giving it my highest rating. Why? It was not so enticing and intriguing that I was unable to separate myself from its pages.

I think it is well deserving of a 4 Star rating and the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

Geraldine Brooks is also the author of Foreign Correspondence that won the Nita B. Kibble Award for women’s writing. Her first book of non-fiction, Nine Parts of Desire, was based on her experiences among the Muslim women of the Middle East, and is an international bestseller that has been translated into seventeen languages. Her first book, Year of Wonders, was published in 2001.

Her latest novel, People of the Book, is inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah.