From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story “filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man” (Sue Monk Kidd). With “pitch-perfect writing” (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as a renowned author of historical fiction.
Beware the ides . . .
Haha, I kid, I kid.
We know the woes of Marmee, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. We know of their stumbles, their (mis)adventures, their loves and their losses. We know how much they miss their father and how they strive to lead good, honest lives while he’s away serving the Union cause. But March gives us the other side, to both the character of Mr. March (as I’ll call him here, party because it sounds fun and partly to avoid confusion), and the war itself.
In March, we see the human side of the victors and the immoral aspect to what we (well, we northerers, anyway) view as a moral war. The entire book, really, is another angle of a story we think we know very well.
This is a bit of a tough one for me, because although the main character is Mr. March, the person who stands out for me the most is the woman we know as Marmee (but we’ll call her Margaret here, since, you know, that’s her name). Fiery and stubborn, refusing to stay quiet when she wants to speak out, not only does Margaret come to be a kick-ass role model for her daughters, but also for other women; she doesn’t let marriage throw a blanket on her fire (not that it should, but I can just see her getting MANY a raised eyebrow in Mass for not acting how a woman “should” act).
When she goes to visit her husband in the hospital, she laments on how she didn’t protest when he wanted to go to war. That in itself was a compelling moment because when he declares that he’s going go to war, he’s speaking to a crowd of young boys who are about to enlist. In his speech he uses the word “we” to refer to include himself in the group and then looks up at Margaret; he sees the look in her eyes and sees her raise her palms, he takes that as a gesture of assent, when in actuality, she felt as if she had no choice. She, on the other hand, thinks that he saw her gestures and “ignored them and did as he pleased.”
And then, Margaret’s plight speaks to a larger issue of war and of women, who are often left to pick up the pieces.
I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind tp pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with. The waste of it.
TOO FUCKING RIGHT. Not to mention the holding things together and comforting the children when the men return suffering from PTSD and unable to mentally leave the battlefields. Then again, Margaret isn’t the only strong character. To ignore Grace, one of the house slaves that Mr. March encounters when arriving at a plantation, would be remiss. We come to learn her heartaches and resilience, especially when Mr. March reunites with her years after their first meeting.
I always wonder with these kinds of novels what the author of the original work would think; if the characters in them would be in keeping with what has already been established. Brooks admits that when she took leave of the story, that she turned to Alcott’s family for inspiration . . . although she admits in taking large liberties in terms of context, and also when it came to Bronson Alcott, the abolitionist and Louisa’s father.
Of course, at the end of the day, we’re left to ponder the consequences of war in itself. “If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?” Who else will? It’s powerful stuff.