Contemporary fiction continues to tackle the Civil War because its ramifications are ubiquitous still: That brutal conflict marks the watershed of American modernity, as the First World War marks Europe's. Significantly, Charles Frazier's rich first novel addresses that watershed not only in its themes but in its very structure.

Cold Mountain comprises the interwoven narratives of a Confederate soldier named Inman and his intended, a young woman named Ada Monroe. Wounded at Petersburg and transferred to a Tennessee hospital in the summer of 1864, Inman deserts and heads for his home in the mountains of North Carolina. His journey is fraught with adventures and pitfalls, with curious characters who unburden their stories to him, and with villains whose aim is to recapture and make him fight again.

Meanwhile, Ada, the well-born daughter of a Charleston minister whose mission took him to Cold Mountain, struggles to reconstruct her life after her father's death, opting to remain at her remote farm in the lee of the mountain rather than return to the city dependent upon her father's friends. Joined by a tough local girl named Ruby, Ada comes to value nature and its gifts, the fruits of hard labor and the intensity of the seasons. As the lovers' reunion approaches, both are aware of their internal (and external) transformations, irrevocable changes that reflect those of the country in which they live.

Their stories, in spite of the overlapping menace of the war, are very different. Inman's is emphatically picaresque, a progression of grotesque and fantastic encounters reminiscent of Fielding or Richardson. He saves a woman from a murderous preacher; he falls into the clutches of a bloated fellow named Junior and his harem of sluttish women, who turn him over to the Home Guard; he stumbles upon a goat-keeping hermit woman who heals his wounds; he takes refuge in the home of a frail widow and saves her and her infant from marauding Federals. Inman moves through these adventures like a cipher, alternately a hero and a victim of action.

Ada's chapters, focused on the farm and her reflections upon it, and upon her growing friendship with Ruby, form a more contemporary tale, the exploration of a woman's psychological development in communion with the stable but seasonal natural world in which she is immersed. Ada and Inman's union is, in a sense, the literary confrontation of history and the present. Readers impatient with the relentless linearity of Inman's progress will find respite in Ada's concentric growth, and vice versa.

Throughout, Frazier has adopted an antiquated style to authenticate the 19th-century Southern world. His locutions sound unnatural to the contemporary ear—"There was scant humidity in the air for a change and all the colors and edges of things seemed crisp beyond the natural"—and his vocabulary thrills in its oddity. He has captured his characters' lost quotidian speech, and the novel's pages are peppered with words such as "hinnies," "spavins," and "taliped."

This rhetorical analepsis alone makes Cold Mountain an exciting work of fiction, but Frazier's prose, consistent and precise, goes further. He writes evocatively about the region's flora and fauna and about man's relationship to it. When Ada observes a heron, he notes that "the beak of it was black on top and yellow underneath, and the light shone off it with muted sheen as from satin or chipped flint." When Inman encounters a catfish, Frazier records: "It was stout as a tub. It was ugly in the face with its tiny eyes and pale barbels run out from its mouth and wagging in the current. Its lower jaw was set back to make sucking up bottom trash easier, and its back was greeny black and gritty-looking." The use of plants for medicinal purposes, the calculation of time and seasons by the movement of the stars, the foraging for and preparation of food—all are reconstructed and conveyed in meticulous detail. Cold Mountain delights, above all, as an exceedingly free natural history, in which Frazier's characters learn and live by their surroundings.

What disappoints, in this fine debut, is its cinematic conclusion, a carefully contrived display of the bittersweet. It is an ending that relies unabashedly on the conventions of romance; and while Frazier has drawn on other literary conventions—the picaresque and the psychological novel—one might have hoped that their daring conflation would produce a less predictable result. This said, the fate of Frazier's human protagonists is not, perhaps, so important. He notes that "Inman had seen so much death it had come to seem a random thing entirely," and the narrative reinforces this sentiment. Ultimately, it is not the people who endure but the locale: Cold Mountain is the novel's true core and, fittingly, its title.