Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503200001
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: G-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This is the kind of thriller the old movie serials used to be - only better.
Bernard Cornwell, the English expert on the American Civil War, presents here the third installment of the Starbuck Chronicles, or the further adventures of Nate Starbuck, the Boston scion of a New England abolitionist. Young Starbuck whose passions are women and warfare rather than his Ivy League background and religion, is come South to fight for the enemies his father wants destroyed.
The first two volumes got the war started, the Yankees defeated at Bull Run (First Manassas), and Richmond defended at the Seven Days. Now, the road turns to Cedar Mountain near Culpeper and finally Stonewall Jackson's brilliant flanking movement and another bitter, bloody whipping for the Yankees at Second Manassas.
Two things make this series of particular note. The first is Cornwell's sustaining development of characters, both large and small, from the emergence of Starbuck as a leader of men (and an increasingly proficient killer of them), to Lucifer, the smart-mouthed 17-year-old black thief who (temporarily, at least) casts his lot with Starbuck and the Confederacy.
The other thing that Cornwell does with great skill is giving an intensely accurate portrayal of the war without making it read like history made dull.
Because of all this, the Chronicles have a take-you-there style of writing that romanticizes neither war nor warrior, yet leaves the reader caught up in the passions of the era and the lives of the characters both real and fictional.
Cornwell's portrayal of Stonewall Jackson is particularly good, capturing all the weirdness for which Jackson was so well known and focusing it in the pinpoint burning of sunlight through a magnifying glass.
The Starbuck Chronicles bring a new dimension of scope and success to the modern Civil War novel. And as the sun goes down on the bloody ground of Second Manassas and Nate's fleeting confrontation with his wacky preacher father, most readers will feel a chill of anticipation, for ahead lie Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House and the tragedy of Appomattox.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB