March

Geraldine Brooks has taken Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and has imagined this marginal character into the stuff of a novel. Little Women was a favourite of mine when I was a little girl but, as I grew a little older, I found it unbearably saccharine. Brooks halves the sugar content by portraying March as a chaplain who flirts with adultery, a coward who allows a man to die for him while he hides trembling, an idealist who makes ill-informed decisions that result in his family becoming almost destitute and having to rely on the kindness of others. He is sufficiently self-aware to be ridden with guilt over his moral failures. The saintly Marmee of Little Women is a hot tempered harridan in this novel. The middle aged March goes off to war to act as a chaplain in the Union army, eager to support the abolitionist cause. He becomes disillusioned by the actions of his own troops who are every bit as racist as the slave owners March abhors. Real life poses a difficult challenge to March's idealistic principles. The slaves, though, are all good, brave and intelligent; I find this generalization off-putting.
I wouldn't describe this novel as riveting but it kept my interest, especially the parts about the Underground Railroad and the plight of freed slaves under Union occupation.
If you want to read something by Geraldine Brooks I suggest you start with Year of Wonders, a little gem about a town whose residents go into self-imposed quarantine during the plague years in England. It is, in my view, a much better novel.