Book Review - The lost thoughts of soldiers by Delia Falconer

 The lost thoughts of soldiers by Delia Falconer

Sydney: Picador, 2005                                       ISBN 0330421794

What a strange and interesting book. Is it a good book? Taken as a whole I think yes, although it's not without flaws. It's an interesting premise - an interior monologue from Frederick Benteen as he wanders through his house in Georgia one summer's morning, musing on a letter sent to him from a young man in Chicago who wants to write the ultimate history of Custer's Last Stand, and to clear Benteen from the opprobrium that clung to him over his activities on that fateful day.

The book proceeds in a series of vignettes, none really about the battle, but about Benteen and some other (mostly fictional) members of the Seventh Cavalry, about their lives in the countryside, about living from day-to-day, and also about Benteen's wife Frabbie, and his relationship with her.

The book has a dreamlike quality to it, it seems that the reader views everything through a muslin veil. One gets the sense that Benteen is trying to make sense of the world, and how his involvement in that one day has overshadowed the rest of his life where everyone else is concerned. But for Benteen it is all the other moments and feelings that are important, not the hours of terror on that famous battlefield.

Through this work Falconer has much to say about how history is made - how it is made of ordinary men (and women) who happen to be in a certain place at a certain time, but who for the rest of their lives are just ordinary - they fart, they love their pets, they can be cruel, they get drunk and do stupid things, they hate their Commander, they put their trust in him (sometimes).

I found myself drawn in to this narrative - Benteen is such a damaged character, still trying to make sense of what happened so many years after the event, but there is some unfortunate writing that occasionally jolted me out of the book. Some of it was technical (pretty sure Benteen would have used the word cartridges and not shells to describe his ammunition), and some of it, reading as a man, felt like a woman writing about a man - it just didn't sit right - men wouldn't think or do the things Falconer has written. Perhaps that is more a reflection on the reader than the book...

Really though, they are minor quibbles: this is an ambitious and even a brave book on such a topic, a book of vivid images, and a book that makes us question how we view history and man's place in it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell