Jeff Shaara, A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh (2012) — a Mini Book Review

12 January 2016

Good and disappointing at the same time

Jeff Shaara’s A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh aptly illustrates the author’s strengths and weaknesses. What works for some readers will not work for historically knowledgeable others.

Note

A Blaze of Glory is the first in Shaara’s quartet covering the Civil War’s western theater.

I favorably reviewed the second in the series, A Chain of Thunder, here.

Let’s start with John Jorgensen’s intelligent and thoroughly justified negative review on Amazon.com

Jorgensen’s summary serves to orient potential readers to the book’s obvious shortcomings, some of which also grated on me in A Chain of Thunder:

Years ago Shaara seemed to have hit on the right balance for humanizing historical characters in fiction. This time he goes too far in the direction of making them emotional.

The generals are constantly being written as anxious, distrustful, frustrated, nervous, insecure, irritable, haggard, and weary.

They second-guess themselves, bicker with one another, and believe all is lost before the battle has started.

[Union General] Sherman's streak of emotional instability in particular is fairly well documented by the standards of the time. But these feelings so dominate large sections of the book that at one point I realized the entire novel felt like some angst-ridden adolescent's diary.

The marching and maneuvering that sets up the battle unfolds at a tediously slow pace. The scenes are monotonous and repetitive. . . . The only real variety we see during this stage comes about when characters fret over things happening in other theaters of the war which are never really explained . . . . For instance, both Grant and Sherman repeatedly cast aspersions on Grant's superior officer, Henry Halleck.

Halleck doesn't appear or do anything until the final chapter, and the ramifications of what he's done are written about in the Afterword so most of the chapter can be devoted to [Union Private] Bauer trying and failing to help a friend sort out some irrelevant personal problem . . . .

[T]hose of us who know the Civil War know the story of why Halleck and Grant don't get along; but it's never fleshed out in the text . . . . Even if you don't mind being expected to use your own prior knowledge to fill in the gaps in a novel--and I do!--it's a really bad idea to have so much dramatic tension centering on a point that's never addressed.

Once the battle starts, it's just a mess. . . . [S]ince no one can observe more than one sector firsthand at a time, no one man could know everything that was happening . . . .

[I]n a novel involving multiple narrators, is it really too much to hope that the reader will be able to piece together a fairly accurate picture based on the sum total of what each character knows?

Mr. Jorgensen essentially takes the impregnable intellectual position that History’s purpose (whether fictionalized or not) is to clarify, not to obfuscate.

I cannot argue with that. However, I did see some military educational value in Shaara’s unwillingness to meld varying perspectives. The author’s purpose was not to clarify History, but to simulate it in ways true to individual people’s perceptions of goings on at the time.

Note

For what it is worth, I agree with Jorgensen that the book’s interminable first 100 to 150 pages (or so) are boringly tedious dreck. I felt my aged life dripping away in reading them, and I almost put the book aside.

My reading of the book saw significant strengths in Shaara’s arguable “mess” of things

For example, I quickly learned to ignore Shaara’s excessive emotionalizing in both books. A general of Sherman’s caliber most probably could not have prioritized his angst to the degree that Shaara says he did and still been militarily successful.

In my psychiatrically mildly educated opinion, Shaara’s over the top characterization of Sherman (and others’) free floating anxieties is probably mistaken as a matter of medical probability. Just because we feel constantly discombobulated does not mean that our ability to functionally control anxiety fails. I am thus critical of Shaara’s inability to convey the likelihood that Sherman’s neurotic self-second-guessing was better repressed than the author has it appear.

Second, regarding John Jorgensen’s critique of Shaara’s confusing story-telling, my perspective is subjectively the opposite.

Admittedly, Shaara’s story is incontrovertibly confusing. I cannot recall an account that provides so little useful information about the conflict. Reading Shaara’s version, one does not even recognize Shiloh as itself. But this may be Shaara’s intended point about the confusion entailed by pre-electronics warfare:

Sherman lowered the glasses, saw the man pointing, looked out toward the woods that way. The trees were fifty yards away, and through the gaps emerged a line of men, muskets high, bayonets, none of them wearing blue. He stared at them for a long second, the soldiers seeming to absorb the scene as he was.

“My God . . . they are attacking us.”

“Colonel, hold your position! No retreat here! Do you understand?”

Appler seemed dumb with shock, did not respond. Sherman was already moving pats him, knew there was not time for this, to soothe one man’s panic.

“I will send assistance! Hold here! Do not retreat!”

The musket fire drew closer, the men running past him now, unstoppable, and behind them, out in the broad field, the slow and steady pursuit, a vast, dense line of gray.

My support for Shaara’s rendition

According to author Jeff Shaara, the Union Army had no idea that Confederate troops at Shiloh had sneaked up to their perimeter and intended to drive them back into the Tennessee River. General Sherman, for example, frequently expresses irritation with panicked reports from Union pickets — believing these to be overreactions brought on by lack of training and cowardice.

When Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnstone’s forces attack, the Union side is caught pants-down and a chaotic retreat ensues. Much of Shaara’s account revolves around:

the massive surprise presented by the cleverly planned and executed Confederate attack,

Union commanders’ futile attempts to corral and turn their fleeing soldiers,

and

the same commanders’ equally hapless attempts to figure out who was where

and doing what

on both sides of the rapidly moving lines of engagement.

During the height of the tumultuous battle, the same concerns began to affect rebel leaders, with virtually only Colonel Forrest’s Confederate cavalry having any idea of what was going on.

Confusion (I think) is the author’s point. In my words:

What does one do when the engagements are scattered, positions are collapsing, panic is everywhere, and one cannot even see the various fields of engagement and the varying subordinate commands’ geographic relationship to them?

The book’s value lies in this “what does one do” aspect

It is difficult to prepare inexperienced leaders (from sergeants through generals) for the psychic weight of ignorance and disarray in the field.

Jeff Shaara masterfully offers examples of the tactical and psychological realities of the fog of war.

What reviewer John Jorgensen legitimately considers to be a glaring weakness in A Blaze of Glory, I consider its greatest strength — even genius.

Recommended — to those who are attuned to my more limited impression of the novel’s basic purpose

I do not quarrel with John Jorgensen’s intelligently positioned negative review. As a comprehensible overview of the Battle of Shiloh, Shaara’s book is bad.

On the other hand, as a presentation of the psychology of combat in pre-satellite times, it is brilliantly successful. Our subjectively opposite reviews illustrate these two poles.

PeteFree.com

Jeff Shaara, A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh (2012) — a Mini Book Review