John Wilson
Good writing avoids clichés, yet a cliché lies behind good writing. "Show, don't tell" is the well-worn adage, drummed out in seminars and workshops, classrooms and writers' circles.
But doesn't fiction for young adults, especially historical fiction, need to tell a little more than books for their parents? Don't we assume that fewer subtleties can be sneaked in, even if those subtleties make a book more literary? Over-tell and under-show, and the story can dry up on the page, failing to whet a teen reader's interest at a time when video games, TV and films can dramatize history as thrillingly as books.
This high-wire act of showing and telling - trying not to teeter into overly sophisticated prose or stumble into condescension toward the reader - is tricky. But the battle is largely won by John Wilson in his American Civil War novel Death on the River, a generally engrossing, vivid and even horrifying read that cannons into the United States' bloody 1860s, only occasionally misfiring with overstatement.
From the instant Jake Clay, young Union soldier, pulls back the sheets of his Memphis hospital bed, determined to walk home to rural New York, there's a sharp twinge to much of the prose, from the coldness of the floor to the envy of the legless man in the next bed.
As Jake recounts the battlefield of Cold Harbor, Va., his imprisonment in Andersonville, Ga., and his tortuous return by foot, train and riverboat, Wilson doesn't shy from the awful details, including the maggot-swarmed corpses and the burned victim of a boiler explosion. Jake's sense of the camp is pungent: "Worst of all, there's a smell. It's mostly the smell of human shit, but there's an underlying sweetness that I recognize from the slaughter shed on the farm. It's the smell of death."
In the Union Army's defeat at Cold Harbor, "Minnie balls" mow down men, the "Rebs" capture "blue-bellies" and, before the slaughter, a soldier's dialect makes his fatalist vision all the more poignant: "Pin this paper with my name on it to the back of my jacket so's they'll know whose corpse it is after the fight, and I'll do the same fer you." The story could use even more casual slang, while Jake's own narrative voice can be too creaky.
His self-consciousness is a stiffer problem, because it's ahead of its time and the reader. Jake's sense of trauma can be too modern: "In twenty-four hours … any control I had of my life has vanished"; "It's what you bring home inside your head that's the problem." Four chapters in, this naive boy, moulded too soon by the war into a hard man, tells too soon what the book should make us feel before he does: "I was stupid to think this War between the States was a glorious crusade for the Union and against slavery."
Jake is inexplicably unmoved by Lincoln's assassination, even though he states twice that Lincoln symbolized the Union. The prison camp is repeatedly called Hell long after its fiendishness is obvious, and though the book is good material for a Grade 6 or 7 class, I suspect a teen reader would pick up on even a short sentence mentioning the camp's death rate or a riverboat's exact length as a little too encyclopedic, or at least Wikipedic.
But Wilson does offer some startlingly resonant moments for his adolescent audience (the suggested age for Death on the River is 12 and older), especially in the camp, where the unfairness of authority can be deadly: "Rules don't need to make sense; they just are, and you better learn them if you want to live." Jake, trying to stave off loneliness and guilt, confused by his desperation to survive, fatefully rejects a whiny hanger-on but falls in with a thief, Billy Sharp, and his conscience begins to burn away.
The "body-count war" - as John Keegan calls the three-year bloodbath between North and South in The American Civil War - is often laid out with brutal clarity. General Grant, Jake learns, delayed the truce and the removal of the wounded at Cold Harbor because he didn't want it to appear his Union forces had lost. Among the teeming half-dead at Andersonville, only the number of corpses can be calculated with certainty.
Men from a thieving faction of the camp are forced to run a gauntlet of sticks and clubs. The horrible hanging of the faction's venal leaders, in Wilson's spare prose, transcends the moment, the "bodies turning slowly in the afternoon breeze" foreshadowing the darker bodies swinging under trees in the postwar South, the "strange fruit" of which Billie Holiday sang. In such moments, the stark facts of history's own horrible show-and-tell, refracted by fiction, hauntingly raise Death on the River from the grave of the past.
Brian Gibson is a professor at Université Sainte-Anne, where he teaches English literature, including children's classics, and film.