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Do the son's boots fit the father's footprints? If brute curiosity is a crude motive, I am glad to report that it is here well satisfied on a high plane. In every sense, even when compared with the father's celebrated work, the son's uncommon skill has produced a Civil War novel that stands out among all others. Therefore, to paraphrase Twain, "Persons attempting to find exploitation in this literary event will be shot."
Purely by coincidence, I finished reading Gods and Generals (an awesome title) on Memorial Day weekend in flight home after a three-day walk over the Gettysburg battlefield. The personal note is appropriate here. Jeff Shaara stresses the personal himself, telling us in his "To the Reader" that when he was a boy he came over from New Jersey with his father to walk the battlefield.
Michael Shaara conceived The Killer Angels on that trip over a quarter of a century ago. Ronald Maxwell, the scriptwriter for Gettysburg, the movie based on that novel, urged the son to write a novel about the battle's generals during the five-year period before their separate, parallel paths converged on Gettysburg.
With the national consciousness of the father, the son also presents the war from both sides. The 58 chapters of Gods and Generals bear the names of the historical figures, two Southern and two Northern, on whom Jeff Shaara concentrates: Generals Lee, Jackson, and Hancock and Colonel Chamberlain. Not to develop a pattern but to stress high points in the narrative, Shaara alternates among characters, drawing the reader into three of the novel's four parts first through Lee's perspective. The focus falls less frequently on Chamberlain and Hancock than on Lee and Jackson. Now and then, other characters are favored: Jeb Stuart, Oliver Howard, and William Barksdale.
Each man marches on parallel lines with the others toward the explosive convergence at an obscure little crossroads town. Most of the novel is devoted to the major battles in Virginia and Maryland that preceded the march into the North. A narrative this complex is a risky venture for any first-time novelist.
Because the son's novel stands on its own feet, not on the father's shoulders, comparisons by no means prove odious. The son has a greater conceptual power than his father had. His narrative covers more time and space, with a pace that begins in a meditative mode and gradually achieves a marching cadence. There are more long stretches of sustained narrative and more variety in the dramatic scenes; they are more fully developed, and the dialogue is more natural. Jeff Shaara gives us access, as his father did, to the subjective experiences of his characters, but with greater brevity. And the sequences in which all those elements are represented is more skillfully controlled. Gods and Generals is more truly epic in scope than The Killer Angels.
"The Killer Angels opened an enormous door for me," the son tells us in his ackowledgments, "allowed my apprehensions to be set aside, and brought forth the first words of this book. His greatest wish, what drove him through a difficult career all this life, was the desire to leave something behind, a legacy to be remembered. Dad, you succeeded."
The two million readers who revere the father's novel will now have to contend with the praise of those who read the son's first. I recommend turning to the son's depiction of pre-Gettysburg events before reading the father's rendering of the battle. Both experiences will prove memorable, and perhaps inseparable.
David Madden is the Director of the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University. His novel Sharpshooter will be published in the fall.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.