Perhaps Brooks had the US invasion of Iraq on her mind. The novel ultimately seems to have a pacifist ethic, although this may be unsurprising given it was published in 2005. It is pride that makes you think like this, that makes you feel as though you are indispensable … it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. When the novel flips the script and has Marmee narrate later sections she berates March for his masculine pride that has left him with the wretched sullen guilt of the survivor: “Perhaps” he writes, “a husband’s gentle guidance could assist her in the battle against such a dangerous enemy”.

March the man is shocked to find that his love is prone to fits of righteous anger and worries that it is a sign that she is “bereft of the powers of self-government”. Is it ever ok to resort to violence? What is the place of anger? What happens when you bend some values to uphold others? March is at its most interesting when it exposes some of the gendered aspects of those questions. Throughout March the novel wrestles and ties itself in knots over what to do about the awful things that people do to each other. Marmee and March are flawed but appealing characters although it feels a little like their sharpest edges have been sanded off, neither getting to the heart of their radicalism nor their complicity in the systems that have brought about the war. Action and location are compellingly rendered – the heat of the South and the funk of war- and slavery-ruined bodies rises from the page. It is under her encouragement, or so he believes, that he joins the army. He meets and marries the impassioned Marmee, who drives him to become more deeply involved in the abolitionist movement. He becomes a chaplain, deciding that “the pulpit was the place from which to decry this barbarous system”. While March recounts his war time tribulations he explains how he came to be there, from his early witnessing of the slave system while a salesman in his twenties to becoming a avowed abolitionist in the radical Massachusetts enclave of Concord, alongside real figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He is writing from an island in the Potomac River, literally and figuratively on the border between the two sides. “I never promised I would write the truth,” March confesses, and indeed he leaves much out, the horrors of war and secrets from his own past. It begins with March writing a letter shortly after a disastrous Union attempt to gain some ground from the Confederates. In March, both the protagonist’s name and a suggestion of military movement, Geraldine Brooks fills in the blanks. In Little Women the girls’ father is an absence for most of the novel, off serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

March book review geraldine brooks