A flattering blurb on the cover from Harold Bloom and one inside from Joyce Carol Oates certainly underlines this is a serious book; it's also an engaging and entertaining one, one that portrays the personalities and political machinations during the Civil War. Lincoln isn't just a celebrated American president, one considered one of the greatest in our history, he's still polarizing and controversial on both sides of the political divide. He's accused of trampling on rights from that of states to leave the union to individual rights such as due process of law. Vidal doesn't gloss over any of that. He depicts the Lincoln administration's suspension of habeas corpus, shutting down of opposing newspapers, institution of the draft and fiat money and Lincoln's scheme to remove freed slaves to a foreign colony. Vidal, though, does put all that ugliness in the context of the desperate struggle to hold the country together. His Lincoln is cunning, ambitious, driven, obsessed with holding the union together no matter what the personal or national cost and a master politician.
The book's first part conveys just how precarious things were for Lincoln and the nation from the initial days of secession when he as President-elect had to sneak into Washington, a capitol surrounded on all sides by slave states on the brink of joining the conflict. The second part takes us from just after the first battle of Bull Run through Lincoln's attempts to find a general who'll energetically prosecute the war, the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg. In the final Part Lincoln finds his general in Ulysses S. Grant and his destiny at Ford's Theater.
The story is told through various perspectives--though never Lincoln's. We mostly follow the perspectives of two cabinet level secretaries with presidential ambitions, the imperialist Seward and abolitionist Chase, and two young men with opposing loyalties, John Hay, one of Lincoln's personal secretaries, and David Herold, drawn into the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. I read this novel having recently read The Killer Angels, an excellent novelization of the Battle of Gettysburg. This made a wonderful compliment, giving me a view of the entire war centering upon Abraham Lincoln. Serious as the book is, it takes a satirical view at times of its characters (and a cynical view of politics), and one of the more humorous scenes is when Samuel Chase meets with job-seeking Walt Whitman. The book has an exuberance in the gossipy way it presents the various ambitious quirky personalities that keeps the story from being depressing despite the tragic events it treats, from national to personal. The picture of the troubled and troublesome First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, unstable from the beginning and further unhinged by her son's death, is particularly vivid and poignant. The novel is a fascinating portrait of a complex man and his presidency.
