The Crater

Slotkin's massive tour de force is his first work of fiction, and that becomes obvious to the reader quite quickly. In many ways his research is exhaustive. He quotes whole pages of dispatches from the Official Records and has clearly researched the Battle of the Crater and the units involved in the depth one would expect from a Ph.D. and former National Book Award nominee. When he relaxes and allows himself to write, he writes well, and some of the battle scenes are truly excellent. Where this book falters is in its storytelling. It moves slowly. There are too many characters and they become hard to tell apart. The action is broken up by too many retrospectives and dispatches. You really have to have a long attention span to enjoy this book. As far as Slotkin's interpretation of the period, it is very cynical; I put down The Crater thinking that the Union generals really deserved to lose the war for their politicking, stupidity and wanton wasting of their men's lives. Slotkin sees the issue of slavery and black rights as being central to the war, and his book reflects that. One place where he is rather weak is in his portrayal of Southern soldiers: they are not as human and believable as his Northerners. He presents an ongoing clash between officers, even NCOs, and privates which replicates the class conflict which is the underlying theme of the entire book; I'm not sure to what extent this clash really existed, but it is believable within the context of the novel. Overall, this is ponderous and hard to read, but for those who have the patience, it is a very interesting and rewarding effort.

While not nearly as well known as other certified masterworks whose theme is the Civil War, Slotkin's book is a masterwork nonetheless. From a boat trip down the Mississippi by a very young Abe Lincoln to the labor riots of the 1870s, The Crater ranges over a wealth of 19th-century US history. In the process, it reveals an author uniquely capable of bringing history to life.One thing, however, that separates Slotkin's work from other, more rabble-rousing Civil War novels is its often ironic stance. The general officers of the Union Army emerge as hopeless buffoons or, worse, criminals who seem never to have deserved the victory they won only by superiority of arms. And Slotkin does especially well by their victims, the private soldiers of the war, who are portrayed with great sensitivity and detail.Slotkin's work makes one of the darkest hours in American history seem even darker. But it has never seemed realer than in Slotkin's masterful piece of historical fiction.

Similar to Shaara's Killer Angels, in that historic characters are thorougly described by internal motivations and external trench warfare conditions. Pennsylvania coal miners work for officers who were their bosses a two years before; beleaguered, starving Confenderates who were once freemen but now but now are army privates fighting to hold on to slaves they will never own; black soldiers led by white officers with motivates quite diffent than the circumstances that have forced them together. Trench warefare is presented in its grim conditions of August dust, Coehorn mortars, sharpshooting and tedious daily routinges. Life in bombproof shelters for officers and shelter tents over holes for the enlisted men, on both sides is graphically shown. The attack on the Crater is gripping in its courage by enlisted men and their nco's and disgusting as the generals discuss what could be happening at the front, if they could get just one messanger back with a clear picture. At over 550 pp., the author tells many life stories in The Crater; Jews, jayhawkers, abolitionists, ex-slaves, farmers from Georgia and mines from Pennsylania, immigrants and frontiersmen all meet in Virginia, in the trenches at Petersburg, 1864.