The March - E L Doctorow

 The March (2005) came thirty years after the legendary Ragtime (my favourite novel of all time and one of my top five favourite movies).   It is less ambitious, more serious, deeper, but just as satisfying.   By this time in his career Doctorow has refined his technique.   We have fewer main characters but they are subtly drawn and fully three-dimensional.

The titular march is General Sherman's devasting sweep through the South, the decisive and destructive culmination of the American Civil War.   I don't know how accurate Doctorow's take is (it is thirty years since I read Shelby Foote's definitive account) nor how many of the characters are historical.   It makes no difference.   Doctorow gives us confidence in his narrative.   We follow Pearl, the slave girl who can pass for white, other displaced and debased Southern women.   The Yankee surgeon, Wrede Sartorius, the renegade rebels Arly and Will, who hijack the negro photographer Calvin.   Not all the characters stay with the march; not all survive to the end.   But through it all the focus is on William Tecumseh Sherman himself, the maverick who wishes he could live alongside his troops.   He cannot sleep, he bears the deepest of personal losses - and he knows that history will mark him as the villain of the piece.   And we also have two brief cameos by President Lincoln himself - a man who suffers even more than Sherman.   The suffering is where Doctorow brushes genius in The March.   I have not read all of Doctorow, who is grossly underpublished in the UK, but what I have read favours the comic over the tragic.   Here, in this late work (he died in 2015) we get the subtle autumnal tone of history, literally marching on.   There is a transcendant paragraph at the very end which sums it all up: "the shadows began to lengthen as the afternoon wore on.   The green of the land grew softer, and the road,, in a slow descent, passed into a valley.   And then there was a dark, thick grove  of pine where some of the war had passed through..."

That is how a master ends a masterpiece.