Booth: A Novel [Paperback]

David M. Robertson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 1998

A gripping historical novel in the bestselling tradition of The Alienist and Time and Again, Booth brings vividly to life a figure who continues to haunt the American imagination--John Wilkes Booth. The story begins as an elderly John Surratt, the only conspirator to escape a hanging sentence for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, is asked by film director D.W. Griffith to recount the harrowing events of his youth during the screenings of Griffith's film Birth of a Nation. The request prompts Surratt to reread his detailed diaries, begun in 1864 when he was first befriended by John Wilkes Booth and was unwittingly enmeshed in Booth's plot to assassinate the President.

Told through a series of flashbacks, the novel both chronicles the young, naive Surratt's tragic coming of age as he belatedly realizes the nature of the plot Booth has sucked him into, and illuminates the motivations, larger-than-life appetites, and appeal of the charismatic and world-famous stage actor. As Surratt delves further into the diaries and transcripts, it is clear the young Surratt has become trapped in Booth's web of seduction and betrayal. Further insight into the assassination plot is revealed in a surprising twist when the genuine diary that Booth left behind, explaining his actions and implicating others around him, falls into Surratt's hands (a Booth diary, with several missing pages, does exist and is on public display at the Ford Theater in Washington).

Compulsively readable, and filled with brilliant period detail--as well as a dozen reproductions of actual photographs of the conspirators and their execution, Booth is a powerful evocation of a dangerous, chaotic, and tragic time in our history, a story that continues to resonate to this day.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Against the background of the plot to assassinate President Lincoln, first-time novelist Robertson presents a fascinating portrait of the family that John Wilkes Booth seduced and manipulated into assisting him in his heinous crime. Reluctant conspirator John Surratt narrates the progression of his friendship with Booth during the days leading up to Lincoln's assassination in April 1865. Booth confides to Surratt his plan to capture Lincoln and end the Civil War; then he presses Surratt into mapping his escape route. Suspense builds as the fateful day of the shooting draws near and an affair is intimated between Booth and Surratt's mother. Surratt is haunted all his life by the gallows death of his mother and by her final words, "Oh, please don't let me fall." The narrative is choppy in places and the style unpolished, but Robertson's masterful characterizations make up for his stylistic weaknesses. Sure to be popular with both fiction and nonfiction readers; recommended for all libraries.?Molly Gorman, San Marino, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

A first novel about the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, riveting in its depiction of time and place but less convincing in its characterizations. Robertson, the author of a well-received biography of the longtime political powerbroker James F. Byrnes (Sly and Able, 1994), knows how to do research. His portrait of wartime Washington in the last days of the Civil War is filled with vivid particulars, and his rendering of the hustling spirit of the town, with almost everyone angling for money or power, seems just right. The narrator who describes the scene, though, is more problematic. John Surratt is an old man as the novel begins, looking back over the awful events of his youth, at their heart his involvement with the charming, manic actor John Wilkes Booth. Surratt was in fact the only figure believed to be closely associated with Booth's plot who was never imprisoned. Fleeing the country after Lincoln's death, he was caught and returned in 1867 but found not guilty after a turbulent trial, while his own mother was among those tried and executed in the aftermath of Booth's crime. What's jarring here is that Robertson, who starts out seeming to want to plumb the plot and Booth's enigmatic character, ends up devoting much of his story to a defense of Surratt's character, presenting him as an innocent manipulated by a variety of cunning figures, including not only Booth but Sarah Slater, a young actress who may have been a Confederate spy, and the self-styled super-spy for the Union, Allan Pinkerton. Lost in all of this motion is any real sense of Booth's character or motives, or any feeling for the outcasts who became his followers. The backgrounds against which the action is played out are grimly realistic, many individual scenes have power and originality, but the characters themselves remain flat, gaudy, rather melodramatic. Lively, colorful, but finally an uncomfortable mix of fact and fancy. (Illustrated with 12 b&w period photographs) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; aFirst Edition First Printing edition (December 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038548707X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385487078
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #690,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Evocative, but not Gripping Enough, August 19, 2000

By 

Lev Raphael - See all my reviews

This review is from: Booth: A Novel (Hardcover)

One man involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln was acquitted. Based on contemporary diaries, reminiscences, and court transcripts, biographer David Robertson attempts to tell lowly John Surratt's story in the historical novel Booth, set in 1916 and in the last days of the Civil War.

The action begins as D.W. Griffith is premiering his 1916 movie "Birth of a Nation" in Washington, D.C. where he arranges a meeting with the aged Surratt, who has long kept silent about his role in Lincoln's death. Griffith, a publicity hound, would like to get Surratt on film sharing reminiscences and photographs of the Civil War. For Griffith, Surratt is pure gold: a chance to further claim the spotlight and publicize his film.

But Surratt is torn, having lived most of his adult life anonymously after the tragic events surrounding Lincoln's assassination. Through his diary, we learn exactly how he was drawn into the conspiracy in 1864, and the tale takes some exciting and even grotesque turns before reaching its predictable conclusion in 1916.

Character development is not Robertson's strength and the book is filled with stick figures, including Surratt's own as an ingenuous young man. More importantly, until near the end, Booth himself is pretty much an enigma in the book. Though he is supposed to be charismatic, Robertson hasn't demonstrated that by giving us a rich, living character.

The author's skills as a writer lie elsewhere: He brings to teeming and fascinating life a Washington DC (Washington City in the book) as distant to us in its own way as Ancient Rome. It's a city with a half-finished Washington Monument and a Capitol dome under construction. A city where a traffic jam is caused by troops in transit colliding with cattle being driven to market; where the smell of produce and corpses mingles; where officers (but not their troops) enjoy nudie tableaux vivants in grimy saloons.

Since the beginning of the war, Washington City has been flooded with prostitutes who offer momentary forgetfulness of the horrors of war, and with mediums who offer contact with the dead. "In the midst of so much death, shipped from the battlefields by the Union army in the tens of thousands each year.... and the daily arrival in the city of so many distraught family members and spouses desperate for contact with a loved one, these people made a very good living." There's a dramatic and intriguing scene of a medium being unmasked as a fraud here.

The novel's most gripping sequence is a trip to the nearby battlefront in Virginia to photograph Confederate dead. Most fascinating of all, Robertson brings us in on the contemporary craze for portrait photography that reaches even into the White House. We learn a great deal about the mid-century art and science of working with a camera indoors and in the open air. By taking some clever liberties with the historical record, he makes photography central to his story. Booth is unexpectedly full of evocative details and insights into what the craze meant and how it changed Americans. Lev Raphael, author of LITTLE MISS EVIL, the 4th Nick Hoffman mystery (www.levraphael.com)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a perversion of the historical fiction genre, January 13, 1998

By 

Jill Mitchell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Booth: A Novel (Hardcover)

Told from the perspective of John Surratt, perhaps, after Booth himself, the least understood of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, Robertson's John Suratt is very much a fictional Surratt, as are all the historical figures presented in the book. While interesting in its depiction of Civil War Washington, ultimately, the book is a disappointment in that the characterizations are flat and stereotypical as Mr. Robertson dispenses with historical truth in search of a good yarn. The Lincoln assassination and its participants can provide enough grist for an enjoyable and plausible historical novel (as Mr. Robertson describes his work) with only marginal manipulation of history; thus the wholesale manipulation of history results in a work that is, at the end, an unconvincing and uncomfortable perversion of the historical fiction genre.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good, August 3, 2005

By 

David Blanton (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Booth: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Booth" is a charming and well-written look at the time in which Abraham Lincoln lived. It is not important to me that some of the hard facts were massaged a little to allow a novel to be written. Robertson is a professor of the Civil War and there is no reason to believe he has twisted any large political or historical truths here. The author makes it clear he is writing fiction - so cries of inaccuracy are wholly misplaced. The book has the same natural weaknesses that any novel might suffer from: at times trite, wooden language and sub-par character development.