Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie pursues the interests and, to some extent, the methods of her two previous historical novels, The Birthday Boys (1995) and Every Man for Himself (1996). Those two novels dealt with memorable events of 1912: the fatal expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Falcon Scott and the sinking of the Titanic. These disasters were celebrated in England for their displays of chivalry in extremis, the attractive, manly imprudence and amateurism which, to the disenchanted and postimperial eye, were largely responsible for bringing them about. Scott's expedition failed, after all, because it lacked the prosaic professionalism of the Norwegian team that reached the Pole with no casualties. And nearly half of the capacity of the Titanic's lifeboats went unused because there were no precautionary boat drills. But this incompetence was the felix culpa that gave a premise to heroism and models for England's young men. Master Georgie takes us back some six decades to the Crimean War, a scandalously mismanaged campaign which squandered troops to disease and mud and had its most conspicuous folly, the charge of the Light Brigade, burnished into another chivalric myth by Lord Tennyson.

The charge impinges obliquely on the action of Master Georgie. On the miserable periphery of battle, one of its three narrators takes some comfort in being “at least better off as far as transport is concerned; three days ago over two hundred cavalry horses of the Light Brigade stampeded into the camp, their riders having perished in a charge along the north valley.” He buys at auction a “mare so shocked by its recent subjection to bombardment as to have passed beyond nervousness into a state bordering on imbecility, and therefore manageable.”

That obliqueness characterizes the whole novel. The central character, George Hardy, is visible to us only in the cracked mirror of the accounts of three dependents. He is a restless, attractive bisexual, heir to a Liverpool fortune, a surgeon and amateur photographer who feels “that the war would at last provide him with the prop he needed.” He is, in different ways, a beloved central concern of Myrtle, a foundling servant girl who bears his children; Pompey Jones, a child of the streets who learns photography from him; and Dr. Potter, a pompous and touchingly uxorious amateur scholar who is married to George's sister Beatrice. Each of these tells two of the novel's six chapters, starting in Liverpool in 1846 and ending outside Sebastopol in 1854.

George's interest in photography informs the structure of these chapters. Each is called a “Plate,” dated, and given a title which is actually a caption: “Girl in the Presence of Death,” “A Veil Lifted,” “Funeral Procession Shadowed by Beatrice,” and so on. Each chapter moves toward the exposure of one of these plates and the production of the captioned picture. So the narrative action resolves itself into a pictorial summary, which, as it turns out, falsifies what we have been told. The medium that gives its very name to an ideal of verisimilitude conspires with Victorian sentimentality. In plate 1, the twelve-year-old Myrtle acts the part of a pious mourner over the corpse of George's father after joining with George and Pompey Jones in a cover-up of the disgraceful circumstances of his death. In plate 6, George's own corpse is propped among the living to round out “a group of survivors to send to the folks back home” and urged, with them, to “Smile, boys, smile.”

The most affecting use of photography involves a bit of magic realism. The debilitated Dr. Potter, attending a funeral for a cartload of naked soldiers, resorts to hallucination and conjures up the image of his longed-for wife Beatrice, smiling and beckoning him with a maternal sweetness that suggests her namesake in Dante. Just then Pompey Jones has set up his tripod and taken a picture of the funeral party. In the following chapter, Pompey examines his print and sees a blur in the corner resolve itself into the figure of Beatrice. The longing that created Potter's hallucination has burned itself into the plate.

The three characters are bound to one another in their orbits around George by fated linkages of coincidence which I do not need to detail here, and which are the subject of reflection by Potter. The three are also linked erotically: Potter through his relationship to Beatrice, Myrtle and Pompey through their separate liaisons with George. In the end, tipped out of their wagon into the mud as they barely escape death in battle, Myrtle and Pompey grope toward, then back away from, a sexual union. Pompey then dismisses the episode as “not being a matter of great importance. All I'd ever wanted, as regards Myrtle, was the recognition that she and I were of a kind, seeing that fate had tumbled the two of us into Master Georgie's path.” That erotic dimension of social class is expressed more tellingly by Myrtle earlier in the novel in a conversation with the mistress of a colonel of the Guards. Her colonel and she “talk for hours at a stretch,” her friend tells Myrtle. “That's unusual, isn't it?” Myrtle agrees politely but thinks to herself: “Georgie's not one for talking, at least, not to me. Nor would I wish to be his equal, for then I might find him wanting.”

In the novel's first chapter, in Liverpool, that self-protective deference shows itself as she walks quickly behind George, wishing but not expecting that he will turn back to look at her. In its final pages, outside Sebastopol, rashly, she calls to him from behind because she has hurt her foot. He turns to her and away from a rifle raised against him, and, in a variation on Orpheus and Eurydice, he meets his death.

I hope I have conveyed that this is a very rich novel. It is not an ingratiating one on the first reading. It is ironic. It works very quickly in its 192 pages, demanding close attention and not yielding the pleasures of uncomplicated identification with its characters. But go back and read it again, and it will astonish you.