In Love and War, volume two of John Jakes’ trilogy about America’s war between the states, Jakes shows there was nothing civil about it.
In North and South, knowing war was inevitable, George Hazard of Pennsylvania and Orry Main of South Carolina had vowed nothing would destroy their friendship forged at West Point Military Academy.
In Love and War Jakes shows the difficulty of keeping that vow.
In his struggle to follow a dozen members of the two families, Jakes writes chapters that are crazy quilts of story patches.
An extra line of leading signals a change of focus to a different character. The characters themselves are paper dolls moved around on a map.
Jakes’ stuffs the novel with historical trivia which, while interesting, underscore the disjointedness of his storytelling.
Jakes toils to show all his “good characters” developing sympathy for people who are not like them social, economically, or racially, but he doesn’t succeed.
The novel’s only nuanced interracial interaction that of southern belle Brett Hazard and freed slave she assists in running a school for orphaned Black children.
Love and War ultimately proves that in fiction, as in race relations, emotional ties can be built only with individuals, not with abstractions.
Love and War by John Jakes
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1st ed. ©1984. 1019 p.
1984 bestseller #4. My grade: C
©2019 Linda G. Aragoni