Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday October 12, 2010
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BLOODY CRIMES: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse
James L. Swanson
Morrow
ISBN 978-0-06-123378-4
462 pages
$27.99
Reviewed by John C. Waugh
In mid-April 1865, the Civil War was over, but the drama wasn't. The nature of the drama, however, had radically changed. No longer was it the clash of great armies. It centered instead on the separate journeys of two men -- one dead, the other whose cause had died -- to their destinies.
This marvelous book is the story of President Abraham Lincoln's long journey home to Illinois following his assassination at Ford's Theater. And it is the parallel story of Confederate President Jefferson Davis' sorrowful journey into captivity at the end of his cause.
James Swanson, who enthralled us with "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer," has enthralled us again. In his skilled hands these two journeys are rivetingly told, in absorbing, meticulous detail. "Bloody Crimes" is a book about death, but it exudes life. Drawing liberally on firsthand accounts, Swanson covers these dramatic parallel journeys day by day, skipping from one to the other in gripping counterpoint.
Swanson places us at the scene after John Wilkes Booth fires the fatal shot into Lincoln's brain. We are there in the chaos in the Peterson house across from the theater, where Lincoln was carried, where stunned cabinet members congregated in the cramped little room around his deathbed, where Mary Lincoln shrieked "wails of a broken heart" for her dying husband, and where a team of surgeons labored fruitlessly over him as his life ebbed away. Swanson makes us up-close witnesses to what the poet Walt Whitman called "that moody, tearful night."
We are made witnesses, too, to the autopsy and the embalming in the White House in grisly detail. We relive Lincoln's funeral and his lying in state in Washington. We are taken with his corpse on its 13-day journey over 1,645 miles of track through 10 cities across the North, home to Springfield. We are present among the 1 million grieving Americans who viewed the body in its casket on its catafalques at the major stops on the railroad line. We see the weeping of the 7 million who lined the tracks as the train sped past.
It was a journey dark with sorrow, but brilliantly lit all along the line. Swanson writes that it constituted "a ribbon of flame unspooling across the land as torches and bonfires marked...his way home." It was a journey unprecedented in our history.
Jefferson Davis' way to his destiny, with a huge $100,000 bounty on his head (more than $2 million today), was by contrast an unlit, slow, monthlong manhunt through four states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and finally into Georgia, where he was cornered and captured on the Abbeyville Road a mile and a half from Itwinville on May 10, 1865, 38 days after he had fled the fallen and captured city of Richmond.
Swanson describes this journey with the same immediacy, authenticity and detail that he relies on to recount Lincoln's. Davis' slow unhurried retreat, as he still harbored a hopeless hope for his dying cause, was the Confederate leader at his dignified best. With his life ever in danger, his aides urging him to go on alone, escape, save himself, he refused. "He gave me to understand," a member of his staff wrote, "that he would not take any step which might be construed into inglorious flight. The mere idea that he might be looked upon as fleeing seemed to arouse him." Davis said he simply would "never abandon his people" -- never desert his beloved South in its agony of defeat. Swanson puts to rest -- again -- the myth that Davis was captured in his wife's dress. He had simply thrown a waterproof belonging to her across his shoulders, and she had thrown a black shawl over his head at the last minute as he stepped into the gray of the May morning.
The reward for his capture was split by the men of the 4th Michigan and 1st Wisconsin cavalry regiments, which had participated jointly. The price Davis paid was an undignified two-year captivity in Fort Monroe, Va., with the threat of execution hanging over him. It was a fate that the ever-forgiving Lincoln would not have countenanced for Davis. But unlike Lincoln, Davis had life, which he lived out to 81 years, the final few in relative contentment in his home on the Gulf near Biloxi, Miss. And when he died, he did so as revered and as celebrated in the South as Lincoln in death had been in the North.
John C. Waugh writes books on the Civil War era. His latest is "Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership Between a President and His General."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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OUR TRAGIC UNIVERSE
Scarlett Thomas
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978 0 15 101391 3
372 pages
$19.95
Reviewed by Jeff VanderMeer
Mysterious beasts collide with middle-age angst in Scarlett Thomas' ambitious yet frustrating novel "Our Tragic Universe."
Devonshire, England, serves as the backdrop for a slew of vaguely unhappy characters. The narrator, Meg, is a writer and book reviewer trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with down-and-out loser Christopher. Meg's best friend, Libby, is having an affair, and Meg yearns for older, unhappily married Rowan. Professionally, Meg suffers from regret as she publishes science fiction novels under the pen name "Zeb Ross" while continually revising a mainstream manuscript she's convinced will be her masterwork if she can only finish it.
Into this thicket of depressing relationships, Thomas introduces the nonfiction books of a writer named Kelsey Newman. When Meg receives "The Science of Living Forever" for review, it provides the jumping-off point for her intellectual journey. Newman believes the universe is a vast computer that will one day reach an "Omega Point," after which it can simulate a new universe "that will never end and in which everyone can live happily ever after."
The implication is that our world actually exists post-Omega Point and may constitute an unending afterlife, at times penetrated from elsewhere by ghosts, faeries and other folkloric manifestations. Indeed, a friend tells Meg, "You can create monsters, if you're not very careful." One such creature may be the Beast of Dartmoor, sightings of which make the local news. Is the beast real or imaginary? How did it come into our world? Is it on a mission to track down Newman? Answers appear very late in the novel, without sufficient buildup.
Instead, for vast stretches of "Our Tragic Universe," Meg doesn't so much create monsters as coddle fools, exhibiting a patience for Christopher that strains credibility. Why did she ever fall for this jerk in the first place? He's not just unmotivated but boring. (If only the Beast of Dartmoor had devoured him posthaste.) The stasis created by that relationship is reinforced by Meg's excruciatingly awkward conversations with Rowan, each a soap-opera-ish mirror of the last, along the lines of "I want to but I can't."
By the time the characters start lecturing each other about the attributes of the "storyless story," the reader's delight at the initial set pieces about the nature of reality and mysterious books has been blunted by too much rambling discourse and too many poorly paced scenes.
"Anyone can put together a story that has no shape," Meg notes at one point. Sometimes virtuoso writing ability, even pages full of wit and verve, can't save a novel that seems to be about everything and nothing.
Jeff VanderMeer's latest novel is "Finch."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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