Red Moon at Sharpsburg
Mar. 11th, 2008 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_schrapnellShort (I hope) bit of preamble, in two initially separate directions. Yesterday, March 10th, was the day on which my father died in 1966 and on which my grandfather also died, five years later. I liked them both, a lot, and more relevantly here, both were big readers, and both helped foster my early book-wormery. According to my mother, my father introduced my grandfather to Anthony Trollope, and my grandfather got my dad fascinated with the American Civil War. Trollope's not so much to the point, as I haven't done much about reading him since a bit of dipping after the BBC serializations back in the -- ? 70s? -ish, but the Civil War is. Rosemary Wells intersects with children's reading and me through some of the favourite picture books I read many, many times to my own two, including Max and Ruby's First Greek Myth, Shy Charles, Hazel's Amazing Mother, and the Bunny Planet books. So when I heard Wells had written a book about the Civil War, I was well surprised, but knew it was a must-read.
Red Moon at Sharpsburg is quite a short book, though it takes India Moody from just before the start of the war to just before its end. Some of that brevity comes from jumps in action that I found a bit disconcerting at first, until I put them in place with a picture book's page-turning, scene-changing nature. And I thought I was going to be thrown out of the book early on by reading that a neighbour boy, Emory, had 'asthma', which I was convinced was a later word (OED-online proved me very, very wrong on that one) -steepholm took a quick skim while he was here and thought 'white trash' was similarly a term in use only later - he was also wrong, if less dramatically so. (The author writes in an afterword that she spent 12 years researching the era, and I can well believe it.) I soon felt I'd fallen into the rhythm of the book, which is rather different - generally quite spare, but with lovely passages, and a conversational feel I quickly warmed to. In terms of the author's stated intent of writing a book about the Civil War which told stories of people's lives and also revealed the 'profound immorality of war', in a way appropriate for younger readers, I'd say she was fully successful. I might have criticisms - mostly minor ones- but they're out-weighed by the positives.
Red Moon at Sharpsburg is quite a short book, though it takes India Moody from just before the start of the war to just before its end. Some of that brevity comes from jumps in action that I found a bit disconcerting at first, until I put them in place with a picture book's page-turning, scene-changing nature. And I thought I was going to be thrown out of the book early on by reading that a neighbour boy, Emory, had 'asthma', which I was convinced was a later word (OED-online proved me very, very wrong on that one) -
steepholm took a quick skim while he was here and thought 'white trash' was similarly a term in use only later - he was also wrong, if less dramatically so. (The author writes in an afterword that she spent 12 years researching the era, and I can well believe it.) I soon felt I'd fallen into the rhythm of the book, which is rather different - generally quite spare, but with lovely passages, and a conversational feel I quickly warmed to. In terms of the author's stated intent of writing a book about the Civil War which told stories of people's lives and also revealed the 'profound immorality of war', in a way appropriate for younger readers, I'd say she was fully successful. I might have criticisms - mostly minor ones- but they're out-weighed by the positives."One day, India", Emory tells me, "when you and I are long forgotten, people will ask the reason for this war. There used to be one. Now, the war has no reason behind it whatever. It just has a head of steam and a life of its own."The book doesn't take India quite to that day, and much in her life and the lives of those she loves has been destroyed by the end. It's a truism to say war is horrible and civil wars are more horrible than any, but it's no less worth telling the stories which show that because it has been said before. Although there's quiet humour here and hope for life after the war, there's also horror, and it couldn't be otherwise.
"There must be a reason," I say.
"Is there a reason if a comet flashes out of the sky and hits the earth destroying a whole civilization?"
No reason for this occurs to me.
.........
"Once it gets going, war has a brainless energy, India. It's got a beating heart all of its own. These horrible battles one after another are like a life force of rage that overcomes any kind of reason...."
...
"... One morning the war will be over. When the war's heartbeat stops, a white flag will be waved. There will be a great silence, then the birds will begin to sing again, and no decent man would dream of shooting his brother because, from one minute to the next, shooting would become murder again."
A final major plus, as far as I'm concerned, is the 'dialogic' nature of the book. It was a bit startling at first to hear the Southern point-of-view - that the Yankees were all cowards who'd be chased back to their homes with their tails between their legs in a few months, that they were all about trying to impose their way of life on the Southerners or just taking their land, and of course, that slavery is a natural condition 'for certain classes of mankind'. But by the end of the book I thought about how many different beliefs, opinions and experiences had been allowed voice, and was really impressed.
If some of it might be a smidge improbably forward-thinking for the time (India is determined to go to Oberlin College, to study science, and Emory teaches her science, until he goes to be a military doctor, hoping to do something to change the woefully unhygienic medical practices which killed so many), there were of course people that forward-thinking, if well-diluted among the majority. And this is one of the big questions about historical fiction, to which I keep returning: is it a bad thing to endow your major character(s) with more enlightened views than are shared by the vast majority of the people of the time, or is it a valid technique for engaging with attitudes which the majority of present-day readers will find abhorrent? It's probably more common to have a female protagonist who's refusing to accept the 'proper', 'natural' role of women in society, as is found here, than any other possibly anachronistic views, but that doesn't mean it has to be done clumsily. And if it's carefully done, as here, where an ahead-of-its-time institution like Oberlin becomes a goal for a girl who can't stand the idea of becoming merely a 'proper' woman and giving up learning, then it can help readers to understand how things were for a given group of people at a given time, and especially how they might have been for the minority that couldn't live happily with the generally-accepted. (Clumsily done - well, not good.) At least, that's my take today and after this book...
