The March by E.L. Doctorow
ISBN: 0812976150
363 pages
published in 2005.
Ordinarily I would post a little synopsis of my own, but this one from the back is so, so good that I have to use it instead.
In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E.L. Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and un unforgettable reading experiences with awesome relevance to our own times.
The part that gets me is the “floating word, a nomadic consciousness” bit because those are absolutely the best words there could ever be to describe the feeling that this ragged groupings of people come together brings.
On the one hand, you have Sherman himself, who although is absolutely behind the destruction his march is so famous for, is described as being uncertain and regretful in many ways – his preoccupation with how he is viewed by other generals and his men seems to extend to the south as well, as he is shown a few times as being concerned with showing at least some mercy and is of course horrified with what he sees having in the burning of Columbia.
Then there are other characters – Pearl Jameson, a former slave who is the daughter of a slave-owner/plantation-owner and one of his slaves and is quite frankly the best character in the entire novel next to Sherman. She is wily and adventurous and interesting. She seems to be the most fleshed-out character in the entire novel and you can’t help but admire her intelligence and determination throughout the story. Generals and officers and officials within the army itself – Lieutenant Clark, Wrede Sartorious (the surgeon, who honestly creeped me out a bit because he was that typical depiction of a creepy doctor who was willing to allow people to go through heinous things in the sake of learning but was somehow appealing because of this), Emily Thompson – whose father dies early in the novel and she is forced to leave her town after Sherman stomps through it and joins his march and helps out Sartorious and winds up having a “thing” for him, Arly Wilcox and Will Kirkland – two rebel soldiers who escape prison and execution by stealing dead union soldier uniforms and go out and try and make a dishonest way for themselves with Arly at the lead. They provided some comedy but were ultimately some of the more horrifying characters in the book.
Mattie Jameson, Pearl’s step-mother, Stephen Walsh, Pearl’s love interest!, Calvin Harper, Judson Kilpatrick, Hugh Pryce (who I found really interesting – a British journalist), Wilma Jones and Coalhouse Walker, two former slaves who want to make a life for themselves.
Doctorow does a really great job of doing that almost Shakespearian thing of pairing up characters to make powerful statements about their roles and these are interwoven throughout the book to build up story and plot lines. Even the less prominent characters help to flesh out the main characters. While the focus is definitely on slavery and the role of emancipation on his character’s lives (there is one incredibly compelling scene where the march comes upon a plantation where the owner pretty much uses these incredible psychological tactics to keep his slaves from running for freedom), the “character” of the march itself – and the way it fluidly moves across the land and seems to absorb people into it as it grows larger and larger – is almost mystical, like some sort of mythological entity. The way that Doctorow manages to portray this makes the story itself almost seem like a fantasy. It’s very unreal and ghostly.
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