History intimidates fiction. It threatens the play of the imagination by confronting it with unavoidable facts, and obtrudes actual incidents upon provocative inventions. But history, of course, also aids and abets fiction. It encourages a proper attention to detail and character by insisting that, in spite of its enormous scale, it is in reality a mosaic of related fragments and individuals. Thomas Keneally is well aware of this, but it does not stop him, in his new novel Confederates, wandering too freely and frequently across the line which divides constrained research from detailed imaginative freedom. As he describes the fortunes of the Northern Virginia Army in 1862—the year in which they had particularly difficult military problems to solve—he veers between giving a moving re-creation of local but representative events, and lapsing into rehearsals of sterile fact. And as if this uncertainty were not enough, Keneally compounds its...