March is Geraldine Brooks fictional account of what happened
to the father of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Now,
I haven’t read Little
Women since I was much, much younger and saw the movie probably a decade ago or
more, so my memory of the fine details of that book are long gone. Luckily, Ms.
Brooks has an afterword and explains that she took some of the missing
details—the father being gone—and combined them with some anecdotes from
various books she read and on Louisa May Alcott’s father, who held radical
ideas for the time and was much-published. From his writings, she drew part of
her character of Mr. March, the girl’s father, even though she plays with the
timeframe and makes Mr. March 40-ish whereas Mr. Alcott would have been
sixty-ish at the same time. So from Little Women and many other sources, she
creates the fictional world of Mr. March’s experiences during the Civil War.
For those of you who wish to remain lost in the innocence of
Little Women, I might not recommend this book. By its nature—Mr. March is in
the South during the Civil War—it is
brutal. It is graphically brutal, in
places, and brutal by inference or relation of a tale, but mostly it is just
not the innocent book that Little Women is. At the same time, I have to say
that I enjoyed it.
Mr. March is very idealistic and is somewhat radical in his
notions. He is an abolitionist and participates in the Underground Railroad. He
socializes with Emerson and Thoreau (which Mr. Alcott did in his real life) as
they all live in the Concord area.
The book goes back and forth between telling of Mr. March’s time in the South
and where he goes and what happens and back in time to his courtship with
Marmee (who is much more human and has more human failings in this book than in
Little Women). So its sweet and its brutal, all at various times. Before he met
Marmee, he had an encounter with a slave girl, an innocent one, but a loving
one. She reappears near the end of the book and is working in a hospital where
he ends up near the end of the book. That provides some thread between his
young self and old, embittered, deeply saddened self. While in the South, he
works at a plantation that is leased to a slightly crippled Northern man. Mr.
March is sent by the Army to help the former slaves on the plantation, who are
still working there, in whatever way he can and to educate them. So at the end
of their long days of physical labor, he would undertake to teach them reading
and writing and a general education. He develops relationships with everyone there,
with his simple decency and common goodness and by acting as if all are equal
and bringing closer together the somewhat bitter young man who is leasing the
place and the black slaves. He improves their lot—in ways large and small—and
is saved by them during a brutal encounter where Southern “rebels” put the
place under fire and try to take away the slaves they don’t kill.
It is an interesting book about the Civil War and one man’s
experience of it and the inhumanity he sees. It makes Little Women seem
somewhat sugary-sweet and very innocent in comparison and I thought to give up
reading this when I first started. But I think I’m glad I read it. Geraldine
Brooks did a very good job with the story and the small details and obviously
researched it well. I was delighted to read on the back cover that her husband
is Tony Horwitz. If you haven’t read anything by him, I urge you to do so
rapidly! His book, Confederates in the Attic, is a series of essays he wrote as
he visited various areas of Civil War battle scenes. He visits re-enactors and
talks about race relations and it is probably on my list of favorite Top 10
books. Okay, okay, that would be a hard list to make, but I’m pretty sure it
would make it. I think I became more convinced to finish this book when I read
she was his wife. She says, in the afterword, that even thoughshe complained
about being drug around to every Civil War battle site imaginable, it must have
finally come home to roost in her imagination and helped her write this book.
Too funny! I loved that.
Anyway, March is a well-written book and achingly sad and
happy and honest and true. And she writes so that you feel immersed in Little
Women—almost as if Louisa May Alcott had written it herself, only a more adult
book. My Art History teacher said that truth is beauty and if you accept that,
then this book is truly beautiful.