CONFEDERATES by Thomas Keneally

 Finished Fr 6/16/23

This is an ancient paperback that I bought at The Old Book Barn on Fr 11/25/94 and I first finished on We 1/4/95 and I recently finished on Fr 6/16/23.

This was the best novel of the American Civil War that I've ever read. It's like taking a trip back to the middle of the 19th century. 

Thomas Keneally wrote 'SCHINDLER'S ARK' which was the basis for the film, 'SCHINDLER'S LIST'. 

Reviewer comments at Goodreads:

"Another book that was shortlisted for a historic Booker prize, and my last of Keneally's listed novels (he is very prolific, so I am very unlikely to complete his entire oeuvre). This one is a historical novel set in the middle period of the American Civil War, and most of its characters are on the Confederate side, though not all of them are real, as the cast includes footsoldiers and their families as well as generals.

It follows "Stonewall" Jackson's audacious plan to outflank the Republicans by marching north and eventually crossing the Potomac further west than most of the defences, and its events build towards the bloody battle that ended this offensive.

The personal part of the story concerns Usaph Bumpass, a newly married Virginia farmer whose wife Ephie is sent to live with his aunt when the war encroaches on the farm. She meets and falls for Decatur Cate, an itinerant portrait painter from Pennsylvania, who is conscripted into the Confederate army and ends up in the same unit of Jackson's army as Bumpass.

I found this book very impressive, and its account of war is brutally frank and unsentimental. As always Keneally's command of his historic subject matter is very impressive."

From KIRKUS:

"Keneally's best novel yet, ripest fruit of an imagination that has been grinding for years in an effort to energize history within its fiction--sometimes head-on. sometimes obliquely, but never with quite full success. Success has come. The book is about the American Civil War, about a few soldiers--Usaph, Gus, Cates, Colonel Lafcadio Wheat--belonging to the Shenandoah Volunteers that make up a section of the ""Stonewall"" troops under the command of General Tom Jackson. Jackson here is a nearly empyrean figure who brilliantly, woefully outclasses his Union counterpart McClellan; and by using Jackson as a near deity-figure, Keneally is able, very deftly, to give an overall shape (the shape of military tactics) to the senseless death of mere boys. Small scenes, then, can be concentrated on--and they range from the heartbreakingly idyllic (two Union soldiers, two Shenandoah Volunteers sitting down for a rest together in a glade) to the gruesome (limb-flinging carnage among the morning lupins at Antietam). But Keneally keeps his eye on the masterful Jackson, and the dartings of strategy--loops and salients--make an almost beautiful and plastic frame around the awfullest of particulars. A sub-plot involving a Union-spy pair--a British journalist, a Confederate nurse--is of less import; and Keneally occasionally overuses Americanisms. Yet these are minor objections in a book that keeps the reading heart astir simply by its resonant, plain eloquence, Tolstoyan at its best: ""They were certainly proud but had never fought before today. This evening it seemed that God had been saving this hour specially for them. For if they looked at the sunset one minute, there was nothing but a proper golden radiance above a black line of forest. And the next there were batteries galloping out into the open to get an uninterrupted line of fire on them, and there were long lines of men, who didn't seem any better dressed or any more rushed than laborers, moving out of the woods there on that ridge."" A grave and breathtaking book, a model historical novel by a writer growing ever better."