One of the leading writers of historical fiction, Jeff Shaara follows his popular bestsellers, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, with his latest novel, Gone For Soldiers. This prequel of sorts explores the early careers of several legendary military figures of the Mexican-American War who would achieve prominence 13 years later in the Civil War. Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning father Michael, Shaara relies heavily on information gleaned from the diaries, letters, and journals of his principal characters, Captain Robert E. Lee and Major General Winfield Scott.

While the Mexican War had few major battles, there was substantial loss of life after General Santa Anna’s initial confrontation with the American forces under the command of General Zachary Taylor. The outmanned Taylor wisely used his artillery to devastate the Mexican army, especially its cavalry. His victories were eventually trumped, however, by the brutal terrain of northern Mexico and the opposition’s knowledge of the territory. At that critical point, Scott offered a bold move to break the impasse by attacking the enemy from the sea, driving a spearhead through the vital port of Vera Cruz to the nation’s capital.

Shaara understands that the joy of reading these novels for military buffs and fans of Americana comes in the analytical depiction of battle techniques and the key players involved. He takes his readers into their heads, detailing their strengths and weaknesses and how each of them wrestles with the endless crises of battle.

If Scott proves the old master of tactics, then Lee is shown to be the perfect pupil as a 40-year-old engineer who has never experienced combat. It is to Shaara’s credit that he is able to depict the evolving relationship between the pair with such skill and depth.

Gone for Soldiers is an inspiring historical yarn of courage, ingenuity, and sacrifice that depicts the growing pains of young America at a political and military crossroads.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.

Evan Connell’s Chronicle captures carnage and glory of the Crusades The novel as an art form embraces a multitude of expressions, from the epistolary adventures of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to the stream of consciousness wadings of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and many other stops in between. Whether it also embraces Evan S. Connell’s Deus Lo Volt! Chronicle of the Crusades is a nice question, but probably unanswerable.

It may also be moot, because in pre-publication publicity Connell emphasizes that he thinks of Deus as a book about the Crusades, not an historical novel. . . . Monologues and dialogues in the book are paraphrased or condensed from those in medieval documents. Every meeting, every conversation, every triumph or defeat, no matter how small, was recorded centuries ago. The title is Latin for God wills it, the cry that exhorted Christians to go forth and wrest the Holy Land from Islam’s grip. The book runs from 1095, with Pope Urban pleading for the liberation of Jerusalem, to the end of the 13th century, when the Crusades lay in ruins along with many of the sites the Crusaders sought to liberate.

Connell, noted for Son of the Morning Star, his book about George Armstrong Custer, says that for this book he drew from numerous sources, prominently Chronicles of the Crusades by Geoffrey de Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville. He makes Joinville the narrator of Deus, looking back on the entire history of the Crusades in which generations of his family took part, including himself in their closing years.

Deus is, as its subtitle says, a chronicle. This is not a mere literary conceit; Deus literally reads like a re-creation of a medieval chronicle, with its flatness, monotone, and lack of perspective. The medieval chronicler reported events, and left it to his homogeneous audience to sort out the world-shaking from the mundane, knowing that, since they shared his world-view, his readers would be able to do that. Thus coronations, crop reports, battles, and astrological signs and portents were put down hugger-mugger, a jumble of events with scarcely any emphasis, because nothing in God’s creation is truly trivial.

So it is with Deus, with its hundreds of pages of undifferentiated head-loppings, piles of severed body parts, and unending rivers of Christian and Saracen blood each development accompanied by a pertinent, and typically vicious, moral reproof. The tone of the whole thing is morally instructive again, like a genuine chronicle and any irony is totally accidental. Of an early slaughter that did not go well for the visiting team, Joinville says, 4,000 Christians arose to glory in our Savior. To be sure, the events described, though usually gruesome, are colorful. There is the incident of the spy who came apart in the air after being flung toward Jerusalem from a catapult. What led him astray? asks the narrator. Ignorance of our Lord. It is fun to read about pilgrims in a Jerusalem released from bondage viewing the skull of Father Adam and fragments of the True Cross and the stone that felled Goliath.

And reading about the slayings of thousands of Jews and heretics in the course of a campaign to slay thousands of Muslims centuries ago, we naturally contrast that with our own times and realize that the justifications for butchery have not grown any better: Hence the wicked must be destroyed that the good may flourish. . . . Hence, for Saracens to be slain is good and necessary that their turpitude not increase. In the last quarter of the book Joinville begins to speak of his own experiences on crusade. He tells us more about the culture of the period and less about sending Saracens to the fiery pit and Christians to the arms of Jesus.

From this swamp of sanctimony-driven carnage comes the still, small voice of one old woman, who appears briefly and in passing, saying for love of God one ought to live honorably, not in hope of entering Paradise or from dread of Hell. Deus does not say so, but no doubt at some point some worthy knight improved that humanist attitude with a sword.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

Hitler’s Niece, by National Book Award Finalist Ron Hansen, is troubling for the reader. On the one hand, the reader wants to hang on to the perception of Hitler as the archvillain of the 20th century; on the other hand, Hansen’s portrayal is of a driven, inhibited, humorous, insecure, and therefore very human, man. Not sympathetic, mind you, but human. Viewed through the eyes of his beloved niece Angelika (Geli), Hitler is portrayed in this fictional work over an 18-year period from 1913-1931. The narration starts with his school days, continues through his internment in the Landsberg Fortress on charges of treason, touches on the writing of Mein Kampf, and draws to a close with his consolidation of power with the Nazi party. At this point, Hitler was little known outside Germany, a situation that was to change dramatically over the next few years.

Geli was the apfel of Hitler’s eye, from the time she was a tiny child until she grew into full-bodied fraulein-hood. Over the years, however, the direction of his attentions went hopelessly awry. Although maintaining an avuncular facade, Hitler developed an infatuation for his niece that was at once unhealthy and unrequited. Geli was entranced with the man’s oracular abilities, and his free and easy way of spending money on her, but her heart belonged to Hitler’s friend and chauffeur, Emil Maurice. And still Hitler’s obsession grew.

Hitler’s Niece is based largely on fact. Hansen painstakingly researched and carefully pieced together Hitler’s and Geli’s whereabouts for the narrative. Actual quotations from Hitler’s speeches pepper the text. And through it all, Hansen effectively captures the desperation of a man ravenous for love and power in equal measure, a man on the road to becoming a monster, the likes of which the modern world had never known. ¦ Bruce Tierney is a writer and songwriter.

The fanfare for this mammoth 770-page World War II novel sounded a dissonant chord or two. Is author James Thackara a literary genius with the depth of Dostoyevsky and Melville, as his publicists rave? Or is he, as some critics grouse, a pretentious poseur? In fact, The Book of Kings turns out to be one of the most ambitious, eccentric, morally driven books ever run off a press.

At its most frustrating, it is indeed grandiose in the manner of self-taught philosophy. Lyrical passages are artificially sweetened. But for much of its length, inspired writing gives impassioned witness to the destruction of 50 million human beings by totalitarian ideas, insane or wicked tyrants, and feckless democracies. Thackara reminds those who have forgotten and teaches those who never knew that World War II was more about evil than about heroism.

This is not the blue-collar combat experience of American moviemaking. The major characters of The Book of Kings, beginning with four young men who room together at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1930s, move at the highest levels of European society, government, or military life. One of them knows Hitler; his friend becomes a world-renowned antifascist writer. Others include a famous film star and an important Wagnerian soprano. These grand beings have highly attenuated emotions.

Nonetheless, most will directly experience the horrors of the war, and the novel thus becomes propaganda at its most idealistic and benign. When portraying concentration camp atrocities or battlefield slaughter in high-resolution detail, Thackara’s elevated language accurately hits the high key of his humanistic theme.

Unfortunately, the cat’s out of the bag in postwar episodes. Elevated dialogue becomes pompous or goofy when the guns fall silent; noble ideas curdle into elitist fantasies. For a humanitarian, Thackara has a disturbing penchant for believing his characters superior to the bulk of humanity. Even so, this original if flawed novel is rewarding for its view of the war as primarily a European tragedy, its high-minded if self-righteous aims, and its stunning scenes of credible action in a world gone morally dark.

Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, recently received The Stephen Crane Literary Award.

It’s vacation week in Blackpool for Ruth Singleton and her family in 1959. Consumerism is on the rise, while the British textile industry is in its death throes; seaside resort towns like Blackpool will be devastated when the end comes. Ruth’s husband Jack starts his holiday with several secrets: he’s been offered jobs by both his union and the mill where he works. (“Jack is a fervent believer in cotton.”) And he’s received a surprising letter from Crete, where he spent time early in World War II.

Teenage daughter Helen feels thwarted by her restrictive mother at every turn, while seven-year-old Beth, who is recovering from a long illness, is babied, swaddled in heavy clothing and still made to take naps by Ruth. Believing the child is not long for this world, Ruth frustrates Beth’s attempts to complete the various tasks in her I-Spy at the Seaside magazine. Every chapter begins with one of the magazine’s challenges, which grow subtly more sinister in tone as the plot progresses.

All of Sallie Day’s characters ring true. Though he has his flaws, Jack is an honorable man. Helen’s efforts to shake free of her mother’s control are thoroughly convincing, and Beth, who has horrifying memories of the hospital and her surgery and who can “see the disgust in her mother’s eyes and feel the revulsion in her touch” over her scars, is heartbreaking and valiant. There are well-drawn secondary characters too. But it is Ruth who dominates the story. She is a demon cleaner who believes Jack will be faithful because she’s a good housewife. The world is beginning to change—feminism is in its early stages—and Ruth is determined to fight for her corner. “Ruth doesn’t see herself as an individual. How could she be when she’s bringing up two daughters? If she’s doing it properly there isn’t time to be an individual—when she’s not the children’s mum, she’s Jack’s wife. What decent mother has time to be an individual?” There’s something admirable about Ruth, although nothing very likeable. The Palace of Strange Girls is a striking first novel.
 

It can be no accident that Andrew Miller’s beautifully dark novel Casanova in Love evokes both Marcello Mastroianni’s film performance as the famous roue and Joseph Losey’s somber movie of Don Giovanni, the opera about a fictional sex addict. Miller, a writer of haunting originality and diabolic humor, clearly draws upon such images, cultural memories, and the philosophical concerns of our own time to create a character who could exist only in the 18th century.

We first meet his Casanova near death, impoverished, in exile. Perhaps an unknown woman has come to visit as he starts to burn old love letters; perhaps she is only a fantasy in a shabby room. Either way, she is pretext for him to recall his most frustrating attempt at gallantry, a failed seduction that makes the world-famous lover the laughingstock of London society.

This is no insignificant dishonor, at least in the brooding, watery world so memorably and appropriately created for Casanova in Love. Middle-aged, wracked by near-fatal treatment for a sexually-transmitted disease, insufficient in English, and barred from his beloved Venice for various crimes and heresies, Miller’s Casanova arrives in London in a disguise that no one falls for. Automatically, he begins again the familiar games of seduction and gambling. He has enough ill-gotten money for good food, fine wine, and powerful friends. Born poor but skilled at living by his wits, Casanova has cheated as many people out of their money as he has brought to bed, whether woman or boy. An illegitimate daughter, a sensible manservant, and an Italian acquaintance leaven the licentiousness, for they bring out his compassion. But when he begins to tire of sensuality and wonder about the meaning of it all, he falls into a fever of desire for a beautiful young woman, Marie Charpillon, who is his equal at games of deception and acts of unfelt passion. She is, in fact, the only woman who will ever outwit the monstrous faker, and Miller has a wonderful time, as will readers, with her teasing and playacting, her schemes and pinpricks of revenge for her gender. Hollywood actresses must be plotting to cop this role. The Charpillon, as she is called, is irresistibly maddening.

Foggy chill London, crowded and dangerous in a hundred ways, is also a major character in Casanova in Love, as is the 18th century itself. Ingeniously, Miller animates our half-remembered drawings of the period and brings to ground our romantic fantasies from film. We get filth and wit, whores and art. Only in one particular does Miller falter. He probably should not have designed Samuel Johnson as a fairly major character. The great man’s work rests too augustly atop the dialogue here.

Eventually suicidal over his humiliation by Marie, Casanova is brought back to life in a grandly orchestrated climax involving the Great Flood of 1764. The Charpillon is forgotten, the restored city reanimates the myriad stories of humanity, and Casanova goes on to new adventures. By conjuring a credible historical novel from the mysteries of yearning, Miller affirms one of his major themes: the beauty and evanescence of art as both reflection and creating principle of life. Charles Flowers is the author of A Science Odyssey (William Morrow).

What I wouldn’t give for a gaggle of ancestors like Janice Woods Windle’s. They make such marvelous fiction! Although, to tell the truth, perhaps all of us have these characters in our background and simply lack the documentation, or the energy, to search it out. Why, I remember tales about my Grandma Fahs . . . but, right, we’re talking about Windle’s good luck.

Still, while the author’s pedigree, with its Texas setting and larger-than-life family stories, may have been a lucky stroke, every page of this extraordinary novel about an extraordinary woman must owe its accomplishment to hard labor and a mighty gift of re-creation. Laura Woods would have been proud of her granddaughter.

The leading lady of Hill Country, Laura was an intelligent, simple, complicated woman. Born about 1868, she led a Texas-sized life, jam-packed with experiences ranging from Indian raids to helping her dearest friend’s baby boy, Lyndon Johnson, grow up to be President of the United States. She witnessed the community lynching of a white murderer, fell in love with a pariah, lived alone on a wilderness ranch, endured Mexican revolutionary violence and a horrible train wreck, helplessly watched a daughter’s slide into schizophrenia, engaged in feminist and political activities, flew with Charles Lindbergh and, aged 93, moved to California. When that didn’t work, she got herself back to Texas again, hampered by age but up to the challenge. Last seen, she’s doing for herself once again, happily skipping a rest home in San Marcos.

During this long life, she wrote everything down: random thoughts, momentary furies, things she must do, things others should do, observed injustices, acknowledgment of the folly and error of those around her. She saved them all, along with carbons of letters giving advice to 11 American presidents and many other public personalities, and boxes full of photographs, newspaper articles, campaign materials from political contests she had worked in, and voluminous correspondence and personal files. In her seventies, she started to write a book about her life, and, if the purported excerpts in Hill Country are authentic, she possessed a writing style and wisdom equal to Windle’s own.

That’s saying a lot because, except for a grating tendency to use like for as, Windle’s work is fresh and imaginative. She rarely settles for cliches, and her evocation of very old age seems remarkably real. (As far as I can tell, of course.) She has wisely chosen to tell Laura’s story in novel form. This worked well with Windle’s first novel True Women, which uses other feisty feminine forbears as the basis for punchy, adventurous storytelling. Hill Country repeats themes from the earlier book, but its power is intensified by the focus on a single, strong woman.

There’s heft to this book, of the human kind that comes from the substance of a life lived in real time and historic circumstances. Some might call her a survivor, but that word is too passive for Laura. She doesn’t just endure life, she triumphs over it.

Maude McDaniel is a freelance writer in Cumberland, Maryland.

If you have read O’Brian’s work, then you are probably addicted to him. To this group of readers, I offer reassurance: the master has turned another great performance. To the not yet addicted, I owe an explanation. This is the 18th novel in a series which has been called the best historical novels ever written. The two central characters, Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy officer, and his particular friend, Stephen Maturin, an Irish/Catalan physician, natural philosopher, and intelligence agent, roam the seas in search of the King’s enemies. Aubrey’s officers and men more often than not defeat these enemies in thrilling actions whose accounts, we are assured by the author, are perfectly accurate renditions of real battles in the Napoleonic wars. But there is far more than that. O’Brian places the reader in his world in much the same way one comes to know a foreign country by traveling there. You overhear a bit of conversation which conveys where the plot is going, rather than having it explained. The nautical vocabulary is used rather than defined, and soon enough, as with a foreign language, you begin to understand the difference between a cathead, catting the anchor, and a cat o’ nine tails. And there is wit. Aubrey remarks of a Dalmation headland, Cape San Giorgio . . . Have you noticed how foreigners can never get English names quite right? With the dialogue doing most of the work, O’Brian’s exposition can be jewel-like. Here he describes the arrival of a one-handed midshipman before an action: William Reade came up the side, his hook gleaming and with something of the look of a keen, intelligent dog that believes it may have heard someone taking down a fowling-piece. One of O’Brian’s most intriguing talents is that of ellipse, of letting a fact of immense importance be dropped, almost casually, in the dialog of a minor character, or en passant in the past tense. He is capable of building the tension before a naval battle for a third of a book and then calling off the battle and he can do this without irritating the reader. Sadly, two of our veteran characters, members of the literary family, are killed off in this volume, and O’Brian spends no more than a dozen words on either death. It is told without a hint of sentiment but with a resonance that pervades the book. In the end, of course, it is the richness of O’Brian’s characters which explain his abiding appeal. After 18 volumes, Jack and Stephen, their wives, their shipmates and enemies, become like members of our family. The constant repetition of their foibles and mannerisms, the total consistency of the great strains of their character, all seem to underline the essential truth of these works of fiction. If his work is the product of a formula, then it is a formula which works just like life. The constants are the people. It is the scene outside them that changes as the ship bowls along.

J.

W. Foster is a sailor and attorney in Columbia, South Carolina.