THE FIRES OF PRIDE

A long, exhausting but worthy conclusion to The Sands of Pride (2002), following the roles of more than fifty historical and fictional characters depicting North Carolina’s role in the Civil War.

With its preceding volume, Trotter’s epic aspires to be an American literary equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. So many intricately observed characters and incidents pile up so that the story ceases to be about the bloodiest, most catastrophic conflict Americans have ever fought, and becomes instead a wonderfully complicated evocation of the role of pride in human destiny, with all the irony, heroism, passion, sentimentality, and violence that epic historical fiction demands. But Trotter's aspirations aren’t merely literary. Dialogue passages laden with history-speak, and tour-guide digressions about landscape and military lore, serve as correctives to the more prevalent scholarly attitude that North Carolina’s influence in the Civil War was more political than strategic, given that most of the more studied battles, including Gettysburg (where, Trotter informs us through one of his characters, a so-called eyewitness account of North Carolina's brave forces falling apart during the bloody disaster of Pickett’s Charge was a lowly canard!) occurred outside the state. Trotter can be forgiven some of his scholarly fusillades, having fired his biggest guns in his three-volume history The Civil War in North Carolina. The battle scenes here, especially the climactic assault on Fort Fisher, are astonishingly accomplished, and when Trotter probes the human side of history in his fiction, his epic soars, especially in his accounts of the fabulous sea battles around the Outer Banks among Union Navy patrols and dashing Confederate blockade runners, and the moving, conflicted heroism of the African American “buffalo” soldiers.

Excessive, obsessive, overlong but filled with moments of grandeur, insight, tearful tragedy, and rousing derring-do: War and Peace, American style.