The Lost Thoughts Of Soldiers

The Wild West. Custer's Last Stand. The Battle of Little Bighorn. The stuff of myth and legend and a hundred Cowboy and Indian films. What was it all about? What did it all mean? Delia Falconer ponders these questions in her beautiful and very moving second novel.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, twenty years after the event, Frederick Benteen, a captain in General Custer's Seventh Cavalry of the Indian wars campaign, is looking back over his life. What did shape his life? What does make a man? How does one see one's own life? His flickering memories focus on the two days he was trapped on "that" ridge. He is not interested in the grand sweep of history or the cult of Custer (bad/wrong) but in "the seams and spaces in between". For him it's the thoughts, dreams, jokes and stories of his fellow soldiers that tell the true story. These are the ghosts that haunt him.

Delia Falconer, (whose much admired and much praised first novel The Service of Clouds has just been reissued) writes prose with a poet's intensity and feeling for language. Exquisite writing. She can capture the essence of a character in a name and a few particular observations.There's the melancholy poet Star-Gazer ,mysterious Handsome Jack, De Rudio, the bugler, Grasshopper Joe, Young Tom, Custer's brother, Monroe the cowboy and a ragged retinue of lost souls. And in the same impressionistic way she renders the brooding presence of the plains out west where another dimension is the lost thoughts of the Indians too where "the shock was in seeing the Indians as more than an idea".

This is both an elegy and a eulogy for the dead, for those who survived and for "history being the sum of the griefs we choose more than the triumphs".

Sally Madsen is from Readings Carlton