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 effects with the very thing he hopes will cure them. Whenever he feels himself likely to be accused of writing a historical account rather than a historical novel, he works himself into an excess of imaginative vigour—usually over some more or less stomach-turning episode. The result is an ambitious but very uneven book which directs most of its interest below the belt. No doubt exalted emotions were few and far between in the ranks of the Confederate army—but here its attempts to form a coherent nation seem to be impelled almost exclusively by lust and diarrhoea….
Throughout Confederates characters are never sure of their own autonomy; they are, Cate tells Usaph, "dead in the heart of history, like currants in a cake", and their moral worth cannot be accurately measured. Cate's apparent punishment by war is not the result of his spiritual inferiority to Usaph, but of his being history's victim. Like the enemies he fights, and the generals he serves, he cannot discover a system of absolute and just principle which relates effects to their causes.
Andrew Motion, "Shenandoah Shenanigans," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1979; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 4001, November 2, 1979, p. 11.
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