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[published by New York, etc.: Dutton, 2002]

I recall reading the first couple of installments in John Jakes' first big generational saga (The Bastard and The Rebels) years ago, being bored as heck, and deciding I really didn't need to bother with anything else he wrote. It's not that he's a bad writer from a technical standpoint, but his characters and plots were so generic that I just could not figure out their appeal. Calling them "cookie cutter" is giving them too much praise. But, hey, this one's Southern Campaign (for about the first third of the book, anyway) and I suffer from curiosity verging on masochism so here I am again.

I must say, the first thing that caught my attention in the story of young Edward Bell was a rather unlikely miracle. Edward is a young Charlestonian, sent off to study law in London's Middle Temple. Fearful (with good reason) that his girlfriend's going to marry someone else, or that his home town's going to stage a rebellion and have all the fun without him, he decides to come home in late-1779. Now, here's the miracle part. In November, 1779, he's in London, dreaming of the elusive Lydia, but by the time Sir Henry Clinton is marching northwards from Savannah (Feb - Mar, 1780) and the British fleet is moving in on Seabrook Island (February, 1780), Edward is home in Charleston, telling his father that "last month I heard news of Clinton's armada." (p17) So the news that Clinton sailed from New York (Dec. 26, 1779) has made it to London, and Edward has made it home to Charleston in roughly six weeks. That is one heck of a lucky set of tail winds, especially for winter. Sir Henry would've given his eyeteeth for that kind of turnaround time on communications with home.

That's pretty much the only laugh the book offered, aside from a couple of brief scenes involving a monkey which had been renamed Colonel Balfour in honor of poor, abused Nisbet (who really does have almost as many bones to pick with novelists as Ban). Everything else is, well, generic. If you spend five minutes making a list of the most obvious things likely to happen to a young man in Edward's position in a mainstream novel, you will have covered virtually everything in here and can save yourself the price of the book. One of his relatives turns Tory (naturally), he loses a girl (of course), he finds a girl (doubly of course), his family gets in trouble (gee, I'm surprised), he joins Francis Marion for a while (wow, I've never seen that before), he hears all about Ban and the British Legion barbecuing anything that doesn't run fast enough, digging up dead generals, etc. etc. (yadda yadda). There's a generically offensive double-standard throughout (quick, someone catch me, I may faint from astonishment) and finally -- ta da! -- a generic conclusion.

And, pretty much, that's it. No surprises, no unexpected twists, no profound philosophy, just a ton of "high level overview" narrative to bridge the gaps between individual scenes. Oh, right -- the Legion does acquire a fictional major to serve as Our Hero's personal nemesis, but he's only in a couple or three scenes and he's a generic bad guy doing generic bad guy stuff. Even Alan Rickman would not be able to chew enough scenery to make the role interesting, although I'm sure he'd look very nice in the uniform so I'd be more than happy to watch him try.

The whole thing is so banal, in fact, that I could've cobbled a review together from other reviews on my list by taking all the lukewarm comments, pro or con, and wiping off their serial numbers. I almost didn't bother to add it to my list, but hey, these things usually make the best seller list so obviously lots of folks see way more in them than I do. The RevWar part's over by about page 120, and the rest of the book covers a couple of generations of Edward's family through to the end of the second Civil War. Not my period of interest, so I didn't even skim it.

[Thanks to Alexandra Smith for calling the book to my attention.]