The March by E.L.Doctorow: Out Like a Lamb

The end of E. L. Doctorow's novel The March couldn't be much of a surprise: peace. Except for a surprisingly strong attack by CSA's Joe Johnston at Bentonville NC, Sherman's progress through South and North Carolina was inexorable and would terminate at the same time as Lee surrendered to Grant in Virginia, followed within a couple weeks by the assassination of Lincoln. Doctorow must bring some kind of closure to all the strands of his story at the same time. Some characters end with hope for a future. My personal favorite character Arly, the rebel soldier who never met a situation that he couldn't reinterpret as God's blessing -- thanks to his own wit, audacity, imagination -- could have been a novel all to himself. His denoument is particularly satisfying, if bitter.

Much of the last section dwells on the meaning of it all. The army seems to dissolve in chaos when its purpose is close to completion, and Sherman himself descends into self-doubt and maybe self-loathing as his mission is accomplished.

Another character introduced late becomes something of an emblem for others. It's a soldier who survives an explosion almost intact, with a foot-long iron spike cleanly thrust into his brain. He doesn't feel it or mind it at first; the doctor Wrede Sartorius guesses rightly that any attempt to remove the spike will kill him, and meanwhile, the man will reveal much about the brain. The soldier's name is "Albion," a fitting name because he's soon a "blank" page (blank, alb, both meaning "white") with no memory besides a childhood song. In alarm, when he can't remember even the start of the sentence he's saying, he chants, "It's always now! It's always now!"

By the end of the book, with the forward momentum of the march ended, and the past wiped away by the war's destruction, that's what everyone is feeling: It's now. Now what?

A humane, wide-reaching, constantly interesting novel.

The March by E.L.Doctorow: Out Like a Lamb | Category: Fiction, News & History