War, like the sea is slow to give up its dead; any verdict on a novel of war so immediately overwhelming as Thomas Keneally's ['Confederates'] should similarly be the slow fruit of rumination.

Since there is no such breathing space for the reviewer, one is tempted to risk the opinion that this author has excelled the achievement of his 'Gossip from the Forest' and 'Season in Purgatory' and that 'Confederates' deserves some comparison with the two great war novels of the last hundred years in the language, 'The Red Badge of Courage' and 'Her Privates We,' one of which stemmed from the bloody springs of experience and one from an imagination of genius.

It is stock-in-trade nowadays that the poetry of war is in the pity, but compassion at the finger tips is another matter from Keneally's compassion of the heart. The setting is the American Civil War, specifically the Stonewall Brigade of the Virginia Volunteers bound for the hinge of fate and Antietam. Thus the title on the face of it applies to the scarecrow army of the South with a clinching elusive victory in the sights of its (inferior) rifles. But the scenes of battle and forage are contrapuntal to the theme that envelops them all, haters, fraternisers, whores, deserters, farm boys, slaves and brass hats alike, all victims and confederates in the pity and madness of war.

Huge and sprawling as the canvas is, the individuality of these fighting and yearning men is retained in spare, telling prose, with few of the purple sorties that this author sometimes ventures. And how many war books bring home the feel of the earth itself, the ever-present earth that takes the blood and the shit and the dreams of tired infantrymen?

As an Australian writing about events so thronged with ghosts, altars and portents for our time but also so fervently and proprietorially American, Kenneally is treading on holy ground. Dangerous ground, too, with such forerunners as Crane, Faulkner, Bierce, Sandburg, but he avoids the pitfalls of pastiche in this noble book.