The impact of this one built with each chapter. I didn't get far in my first attempt at this book years ago. The style is Hemingwayesque. Spare prose, mostly simple sentence structure, repetitive phrasing, a rather staccato rhythm. I felt on first read that it was too dry, too much like a novelized narrative history. In essence, that is what this novel of the turning point battle in the American Civil War--Gettysburg--is about. However, the battle scenes are rendered more clearly than I can ever remember reading in military fiction or non-fiction and the drama makes all the more impact because of the restraint of the prose. Each of the four sections covers a day--the day before the battle, the first day, the second day, the third and last. Within the sections are chapters named after the primary character, although the novel is omniscient throughout, often giving an eagle-eye view or briefly entering the mind of other characters.
The viewpoint is mostly neutral, but tilted somewhat to the Confederacy, with a dozen chapters devoted to characters on that side compared to ten to the Union side. Robert E. Lee is presented very sympathetically, and we're told he "does not own slaves nor believe in slavery." (I've read historical accounts and watched documentaries that dispute both points.) To me though the character on the Southern side that stood out is General James Longstreet, who opposed Lee's strategy and felt his decisions cost them the battle and war. There's a poignancy in this man determined to do his duty despite believing they were headed to disaster, and that in invading the North he and Lee had broken their oath taken as American officers to protect and defend this soil. I certainly learned much about the officers on that side of the conflict to win them my grudging sympathy (grudging, because I don't sympathize with the Confederate cause.) There is Pickett, of Pickett's charge, who was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. And there's Lewis Armistead whose best friend, Winfield Scott Hancock, fought at Gettysburg on the other side. Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain of Maine is the officer that largely gives voice to the Union side, who comes closest to giving us a soldier's view of battle as he fights with his men to hold a crucial hill. He's the man who gives the novel its title. He once quoted to his father, Hamlet's lines on "what a work is man...in action how like an angel." A "murdering angel" is how his father responded.
In the character of a British observer, Fremantle, we're able to see the possible impact of a Confederate victory. Northern and Southern, maybe a Western American nation armed and contending against each other for territory. Perhaps Britain entering on behalf of the South if those states would return to the empire--a vastly different history might have resulted. On the other hand, reading Longstreet makes you understand why defeat for the South might have been inevitable from the start. The book made me feel the weight and contingency of a few days that made all the difference to the United States.
