March on, Geraldine!

I never read Little Women by Louisa May Allcott but I remember reading Jo's Boys, which was one of the sequels or spin-offs that followed it. Now I've read March, Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Mr March, the husband and father who is a shadowy figure in the background, away in the Civil War during the action of Little Women, or so I'm told. It further reinforces my admiration and respect for this interesting writer whom I can claim as a fellow-Australian even though she is now an American citizen, married to an American and living in the USA. I've thought of her as one of the most interesting contemporary writers since I read Year of Wonders, her  imaginative story of the people of Eyam, the Derbyshire village that quarantined itself in an act of extraordinary altruism during the catastrophe of the black death, and in particular, the story of Anna frith, a teen-aged girl who evolved into a healer during the period that her family, friends and others in the village were dying of the plague. I recommend this book to graduate students and residents in public health and preventive medicine because it provides insight into and understanding of the impact of a terrifying natural phenomenon that strikes down people seemingly at random without any obvious cause, presenting vividly the point of view of the victims and their kin as well as the one who tries to care for them. More recently I read People of the Book, another splendid story, this time about people who left a mark on a famous mediaeval illuminated manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah. Historical novels tend to be stereotyped as bodice-rippers and the like, but it's insulting to type-cast Geraldine Brooks as a historical novelist. She is a writer of sufficient stature to be described as a novelist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, forsooth.  

March describes the social and cultural scene in the United States north and south before, during and immediately after the civil war, the superficially 'civilized' southern aristocrats whose genteel way of life rested on the obscenity of slavery, the more hard scrabble existence of northerners in the early stages of industrial development, the hard lives of slaves constantly threatened with brutality and pitiless tearing apart of families.  The war itself was one of the first bouts of what john le Carre called the periodic madness that afflicts the American people. Geraldine Brooks deftly sketches enough details to reveal its horrors and the appalling mortality caused by infected war wounds: tetanus, gas gangrene and septicaemia were invariably fatal, and made this war more lethal than any before or since.  American books and movies have romanticized the civil war, glamorized the warring factions and air-brushed away the sordid details. Geraldine Brooks has confronted these head-on and in this comparatively short book, has presented the most honest picture of the American civil war that I have ever read. Her book is a superb example of historical fiction at its best, she and her book are worthy recipients of this prestigious prize.