 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers
Delia Falconer
Picador $28.00
 Much
can be said about this follow-up to Sydney-based Delia Falconer's acclaimed novel
The Service of Clouds, the first thing being that its author will be a star guest
at the forthcoming Byron Bay Writers' Festival, from August 4-8.
Audience members, like the book's readers, will surely wonder what prompted
her focus on the long ago and faraway American Civil War, a topic that coincidentally
attracted another well-known writer, Geraldine Brooks, whose novel March was reviewed
in this column recently. While the latter lives in America with a husband obsessed
by that war, Falconer's reasons will no doubt emerge at the festival, although
a tantalising line in the novel might give a clue.
Recollecting the campaign experiences of her central character, Frederick Benteen,
a captain in the ill-fated General Custer's Seventh Cavalry, she writes, 'It is
a myth we prove ourselves in war, he thinks: we test ourselves in silence.'
This is less a war memoir - the killing of animals, ranging from frogs to horses,
gets more attention than the destruction of the Plains Indians - than a contemplation
of life and death and the conduct of fighting men as they move through the frontier
landscape towards their inevitable destiny, the battle of Little Bighorn, in which
most, including Custer, would be massacred.
The book is not intended as a 'realist narrative,' Falconer notes, although
it is based on 'an historical incident and its aftermath.'
Benteen's perception of that aftermath, 20 years after Custer's 1868 demise,
is his attempt to make sense of an army career that culminated in promotion to
Brigadier General, court martial for drunkenness and a medical discharge.
During his long service he mixed freely with a colourful group of soldiers,
with names like Star-Gazer, Grasshopper Joe and Handsome Jack, who comprise a
kind of Greek chorus, 'The Choir', that offers a frank, often crude and frequently
amusing commentary on Custer's leadership.
Later, history sought to condemn Benteen for failing his leader but as the
ageing man contemplates how to respond to the letters that still flow in from
people seeking details about Little Bighorn ('War is nine-tenths nothing, he wants
to say'), we realise the fault lay not with him but with the egotistical general.
'He wants to write the lost thoughts of soldiers... not the grand story, he
has never known his life that way, but the seams and spaces in between... the
weight of gathered thoughts, the cumulus of idle moments.'
The imagery of clouds again does fine service to one of our most enjoyable
writers.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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