[In the following review, Gallagher offers favorable assessment of Master Georgie.]

In this short, melancholy tale, British novelist Beryl Bainbridge all but reinvents the historical genre. Gone are moments of derring-do; gone, too, any notions of simple, linear plot. In their place, Bainbridge delivers a fitful, episodic story of death, disease and unfulfilled longing.

The Master Georgie of her title is George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer in England during the 1840s and '50s. He is assigned to the British army during its disastrous adventure in the Crimea in Britain's mid-19th Century war against Russia.

Like American writer Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain, Bainbridge is more interested in war as background than in war itself. Battles are mere eruptions of violence in a landscape already strewn with victims of cholera, tainted food and other maladies.

A conventional narrative form would be too orderly, too forward-moving, for what Bainbridge wants to accomplish. Her tale unfurls in the voices of three people close to George. One is Myrtle, an orphan girl who adores George and bears him the children his wife cannot. Another is Pompey Jones, a vagabond photographer's assistant. The third is Potter, George's brother-in-law and a would-be naturalist in the mold of Darwin.

Through their eyes, we see George struggling to make sense of a world that begins and ends with a photographer's view of death. The photographer's art here stands in for the long view of history. But that view is flawed.

So, too, the medical arts that George practices. His army assigns him to the front but denies him proper supplies. He learns there is no rhyme or reason to a wounded man's fate. Soldiers hideously hurt in battle survive, while those with hardly a scratch die. Fever and bloated corpses are everywhere, but the greatest malady is the delusory belief in the army's mission.

Much of George's world seems enigmatic, as unresolved as a half-developed photograph. Bainbridge, for example, dismisses the famous charge of the Light Brigade in a single oblique paragraph. The troopers' horses stampede into camp, and Potter and others auction off the mounts with no thought for their dead riders.

This is neither an adventure yarn nor a bitter anti-war novel. Instead, with deadpan precision, Bainbridge sketches in fleeting vignettes of horror and madness.

Her prose is as sharp and cold as one of George's surgical instruments. Yet she manages to illuminate an entire world in this slim novel. That world haunts us with images of chaos and death. But no reader can deny the force of Bainbridge's vision.