I confess to finding the randy villain of that uterine jest [Passenger] a more sharply conceived and executed figure than any of those who toil through the mud and blood of the North Virginian Army [in Confederates] as it desperately seeks through 1862 to bring the British Government, politically, into the war.

Confederates, in short, is Keneally's American Civil War Novel. He has done his reading thoroughly, listed the main sources at the end, made a craftsmanlike fiction out of them, and moved on to the next job. Hard not to feel that the precariously sustained subplots of adultery and amorous espionage are there for the attention of casting-directors and that a brief appearance by President Lincoln should not be there at all. Hard, too, not to feel that the proximity of the sources is responsible for the faintly inspirational, sentimental and portentous tone which dogs Confederates as so much other writing about this war….

Homework is the key to all historical novels, and should ideally be felt and not seen…. [Keneally] is very good on detail, and on the nature of battles which he rightly describes as the accumulation of such, but his chief sympathy is with the suffering, boredom, panic and, above all, the pathos of a volunteers' war, and when he keeps those in focus he is very good indeed. (p. 683)