 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
March
By Geraldine Brooks
Forth Estate $29.95
 Australian-born
author Geraldine Brooks, a long-time American resident, turns to her backyard
of rural Virginia as inspiration for the follow-up to The Year of Wonders, her
acclaimed novel about plague in the Middle Ages.
This time, Civil War is the sickness stalking the land, with the struggle between
the abolitionist North and the slave-dependent South providing the dramatic setting
into which the peace-loving Rev. March comes faces to face with evil, temptation
and, ultimately, his own destiny.
The beautifully penned tale fills the gaps in Louisa May Alcott's classic Little
Women, set at the time of the Civil War. Brooks says her inspiration was Alcott's
father, an anti-slavery campaigner and educator who, like March, was deeply committed
to pacifism.
When the story begins, the pre-ministerial March is a salesman travelling through
the southern states with a range of wares - combs, oils, fine soaps, sewing materials
and children's toys, along with books, more for swapping than sale, which marked
him as a man of learning. These would lead to his employment as a tutor by a plantation
owner, Augustus Clement, a liberal but a hardliner when it came to dealing with
his slaves.
Discovering that a comely servant named Grace, to whom March is much attracted,
has helped their guest teach a young slave girl to read, Clement exacts punishment
on her, not the visitor, and forces March to watch in horror as she is flogged
with a braided leather whip that peels away 'a narrow strip of skin, which lifted
on the whip, dangled for a moment and then fell to the leaf-littered floor...'
March, who narrates much of the tale, returns to the north where he marries
a preacher's daughter, Marmee, joins the clergy and fathers four daughters, the
'little women' who would ponder on his wartime absence in the Alcott novel.
As a minister in the Union army he witnesses several bloody engagements, writing
graphic letters home to describe the violence and suffering. Beaten and left for
dead by plantation owners' militia, March is hospitalised and later reunited with
both his family and Grace, now trained as a nurse and boarding with a surgeon's
family.
Offering to help the anti-slavery struggle, he hears Grace reply, 'There are
men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be...
A free people must learn to manage its own destiny.'
It would take another hundred years for the rest of America to listen.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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