BOOK REVIEW

March by Geraldine Brooks. Pulitzer Prize. For a chapter-by-chapter summary, go to Synopsis:  March.

(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  If you have ever read Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women, you might have spared a passing thought for the girls' absent father, Mr. March, who had gone off to fight for the Union Army during the American Civil War. In fact, Little Women, published in 1868, was one of the first books to mention the big issue of its time: the Civil War.

Mr. March barely shows up in Little Women at all. But in March by Geraldine Brooks, he is not just the central character but also loosely based on Bronson Alcott, the real-life father of Louisa May, who was a teacher, an abolitionist, and a transcendentalist as well as a friend of such immortals in American literature as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

March opens in 1861 just after the battle of Ball's Bluff.  Exhausted, Mr. March crouches under a tree, and attempts to write a letter to his wife Marmee. At forty, he is old to be a soldier, though he specifically volunteered to serve as chaplain. Now he thinks of the battle he just survived: a horrific skirmish near the Virginia-Maryland border in which Mr. March's regiment, acting on some faulty military intelligence, forded the Potomac, and got the holy heck stomped out of them by Confederate forces. 

He decides to hold back the truth from his wife and only write glowing, inspirational lies (a decision that will backfire on him).  However, he cannot stop thinking about the young soldier he let drown in an instinctual effort to save himself. Finally, hoping to assuage his guilt with useful work, he walks to the rundown plantation house that the Union army has commandeered for a field hospital -- and realizes that he has been to the house before, twenty years ago.

The second chapter flashes back to the day that March first comes to the plantation house owned by the wealthy Mr. Clement.  Back then, March is a young traveling peddler from Connecticut, trying to make his fortune selling cheap jewelry and kitchen gadgets. He and Mr. Clement bond through their shared love of books, and March stays on as a guest for several weeks.

Even twenty years ago, March is a natural abolitionist, knowing on a gut-level that blacks and whites are equal in the sight of God. But, greedy for books and overawed by Mr. Clement, he tries to ignore the fact that Mr. Clement owns slaves. Two slaves become his friends:  the cook Annie who is the devoted mother of two, and the mysterious and beautiful Grace who is a lady's-companion to Mr. Clement's ailing wife.

One afternoon as he is relaxing in Annie's kitchen, March innocently begins to teach the alphabet to Annie's brilliant little daughter Prudence who is immediately attracted to the words he scratches on the hearth with a bit of charcoal. Horrified, Annie and Grace rub out the letters and chase away the child who cries in frustration. Doesn't he know, they demand, that it is illegal to teach a slave to read? That he could subject them and even little Prudence to a flogging?  March didn't know, but he can no longer ignore the evils of slavery. He begins to teach Prudence in secret, which leads to tragic consequences, including his immediate banishment from the plantation.

This mini-episode from March's early life, detailed in Chapter Two, is one of the finest pieces of writing in the book. It could stand alone as a tragic short story.

Chapter Three picks up with March limping in to help tend to the wounded in the now-shattered plantation house. He soon finds that Mr. Clement, though wrecked in body and spirit, still resides there -- as does the alluring house-slave Grace who has not forgotten March nor her conflicted feelings towards him.

The novel rolls on from there, alternating present-day chapters about the war with past chapters that detail March's call to the ministry, his courtship of the fiery intellectual Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau, his dangerous involvement with the Underground Railroad, and even his financial support of the famous abolitionist and terrorist John Brown.

It is through the war chapters that you come to know the tragic flaw in Mr. March: his idealism leaves no room for either the common sense or the ability to compromise that is necessary to function in the real world.  It is proof of Geraldine Brooks's good writing that you remain sympathetic to him even while you increasingly want to kick his ass out of frustration for the trouble he brings down upon himself.

March cannot see that the troops regard him as a total weirdo for his abolitionist views and his extremely liberal interpretation of Christian tenets.  They adhere to a grinding form of Calvinist Christianity.  Plus, they could not care less about the slaves. The war is really about holding onto those cotton assets!  Since poor March is unable to dial down his personality, he is transferred south by his irritable commanding officer  to work with the "contraband":  that is, the cotton farms and slaves seized by the North from the South.

Here the novel becomes increasingly tragic and fascinating as March ends up on the ragged remains of a plantation being run by the harried Northern lawyer Canning who is the book's best supporting character.  At first, Mr. Canning seems a bigger monster than the old slave-owners. His black field-hands toil in the cotton fields, unpaid and starving.  Only the infants and the infirm are not pressed into service; instead they lie in near-death squalor. One black man has been imprisoned in a dry well.

At first March is overcome with indignation. Then he realizes that the complex Mr. Canning is slaving and starving right alongside the black workers: they are all united in their grim need to bring in the cotton harvest in half the usual time. Plus, the black man in the well is actually a collaborator with the enemy. The surrounding countryside, not exactly "secured" by the Union army, is plagued with roving guerilla bands of Confederate sympathizers. 

Mr. Canning risks losing both his savings and his life.  If the rebels overrun the plantation, he will be tortured and killed as will March for being a hated abolitionist. It is in this section of the book that March makes friends with some unforgettable characters:  the battered young mute Zannah, the tough and competent Jesse, and the little ones Cilla and Jimse who remind him of his own children.

But the mysterious Grace still has a part to play in Mr. March's story as does Marmee who is nothing like the goody-two-shoes whom you might remember from Little Women.  In Part Two of the book, Marmee gets the viewpoint in several chapters, and she is definitely a kick-ass-and-take-names kind of woman. 

She travels to Washington D.C. to take charge of her husband who has been relocated to a military hospital.  Meanwhile she flashes back to her own version of her and Mr. March's shared past. It is through her different slant upon events that he has already shown us that we realize how husbands and wives can completely misunderstand one another.

In the end, it comes down to a struggle for the passionate Marmee, who loves and deeply resents her husband, to rekindle his will to live after his essential idealism has been shattered.  We even find out Grace's shocking secret. (It gives her character the human touch necessary to keep from being too saintly.) This elegant and fast-paced novel winds to its inevitable conclusion.  March is the 2006 winner of the Pulitzer Prize For Fiction, and gets four stars out of five.  You can find it on Amazon through this link:

March

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