Customer Reviews

Booth: A Novel

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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)

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.

"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.

I found this book to be engaging and compelling. It's historical fiction. So for me, I just go along for the ride, pick up some interesting information along the way, and get lost in the story. The pace of the story was good and I felt connected to the characters. Probably one of my favorite books of this type.

Most (though clearly not all, judging from previous comments here) Civil War and Lincoln buffs will applaud David Robertson's debut novel, which rescues a friend of John Wilkes Booth from obscurity and places him at center stage. Robertson brings to life John H. Surratt, tried as a co-conspirator and acquitted -- two years after his mother was convicted on the same charge and became the first woman to be hanged by the U.S. government. But "Booth" is a book for even readers with no special interest in the Civil War. It opens a fascinating window onto those turbulent times and offers insights -- though, granted, fictional ones -- into a story whose ending everyone already knows.

The novel opens with Surratt's 1916 New York Times obituary and then shows us diary entries he had written a few days before. In his initial entry, Surratt reveals that he has been plucked from shipping-clerk obscurity by none other than D.W. Griffith, who wants to put the reminiscences of the long-forgotten historical figure on film for an epilogue to his new movie, "The Birth of a Nation." He considers Griffith's proposal: "Perhaps," he writes, "it was time to tell the full truth about the Lincoln assassination." And with that, the septuagenarian opens up his diaries from the fateful months of 1864-65, offering up the observations and narrations of his younger self.

At 21, already a failed playwright, Surratt has just landed a job as a photographer's assistant that both affords him gainful employment and helps him avoid the draft. It was a strong recommendation by his friend Booth (one of the country's most popular actors) that got him the position, and, as he finds out, the favor comes with strings attached. According to Robertson's somewhat defensive five-page essay on his sources, Surratt wasn't actually a photographer, but the author's invention is welcome -- it enlivens both the novel and Surratt's character and allows for some remarkable bits about the Civil War photographer's art: the metal rack that painfully hol! ds subjects' heads and bodies still; the delicate glass-and-chemical work to produce photographic plates; and "the bane of the photographers' art" -- the light-absorbing fabric called bombazine. Surratt's boss complains that "with the fashion in ladies' dress, a pretty maiden of twenty who comes to my studio in her best bombazine outfit becomes . . . a fleshy blob of a face swimming in an inky darkness."

The truly fascinating element of the novel, though, is the relationship between Booth and Surratt, who is torn between obligation and independence, struggling for control over "Booth's presence in my life." Robertson's Surratt is a reluctant cipher, a humorless man searching for a cause; it's all too easy to fall under Booth's sway. He's aware of this influence, disturbed by it, fights it. He frets about his place in Booth's shadow even as his friend worries that "he is not the great man onstage" that his father, Junius Booth, was. At times Surratt reflects upon "how lucky I was to be able to call a man like John Wilkes Booth my friend." But he's fully aware that Booth is a "subtle manipulator and egotist"; even as he marvels at his friend's generosity, "I couldn't help wondering what Booth wanted."

It turns out that what Booth wants is help with a wild scheme: He intends to kidnap President Lincoln as a prisoner of war, to stop all the killing; his primary concern is that the Union army is bent on humiliating the South. His safety compromised, Surratt turns against his friend: "Booth has reduced my life to comical farce, and a low bumbling comedy. . . . I fear he is a loose cannon, and sure to get me killed -- and over something about which I am utterly disagreed with him on. Why did I ever think Booth was my friend? How can I now disassociate myself from him?" He tries to disentangle himself, deciding that "with the return of peace I will back away from Booth, and turn once again to my own hopes, my own future." But, of course, eventually it's too late, and Booth commits "the one act that would write! my name forever in the history books, and, I prayed, make the South whole again."

This last bit is from Booth's diary, written during his flight after Lincoln's murder. Booth's entries are by turns contemplative and thrilling -- and, considering the harried circumstances of their writing, a little too glossy to seem genuine. Indeed, both diaries read more like meticulously edited historical fiction than contemporary journals. They're far too nuanced and accomplished, laced with italicized flashback phrases and artful foreshadowing. The entries conclude with teasing cliffhangers. There are no missteps, no unsurety, no spontaneity. They don't *sound* right. Surratt's recollection of even throwaway dialogue is too pitch-perfect to be real, as when Booth tells a colleague: "Lewis, there is also a sideboard at the bar with pickled eggs, oysters, and beefsteaks for sandwiches. . . . You must get yourself something to eat. It's all right." Not even Truman Capote would have remembered these lines! Many readers have trouble when an author gives us an unreliable narrator, but sometimes a narrator can be *too* reliable.

The upside to the writing's shininess is that "Booth" is very smooth reading -- though I can't resist pointing out a rare stumble, when Surratt describes his dread: "I felt a cold shiver in my bowels, as if the shadow of death had sent a chill wind through them." Somehow I doubt Robertson was aiming to instill an image of wind in Surratt's bowels. But this type of lapse is unusual. "Booth" is a gripping, enlightening read that's well worth the time of even those who don't often pick up historical fiction. And for Civil War aficionados: Don't miss this one.

Thankfully, I borrowed this book from the local library. Robertson has little skill as a novelist and obviously is attempting to capitalize on the success of literary historical thrillers like Caleb Carr's two recent books. Problems I have: 1. The narrator is a dullard, a naive and uninteresting photographer wannabee who is constantly astonished and amazed by the actions of everyone around him. 2. The attempt to incorporate the metaphor of photography throughout the novel (the 2 epigrams at the novel's start hint at extensive use of this device) has potential but in the hands of this slipshod and unimaginative writer is maddening. 3. John Wilkes Booth, the title character, is not made full use of and when present is as uninteresting as Surratt, the photographer.

Those interested in the real facts would do well to read a brief and far more exciting account of the life of one of Robertson's peripheral characters, William "Lewis" Powell, in the Spring edition of DoubleTake magazine. Powell was one of Booth's cronies in the kidnap plot and according to the author of the DoubleTake article was a violent, complex young man. Certainly the adventures Powell lived would make better reading in the novel, but Robertson consigns Powell to the background and, strangely and ironically, strips him of his complexity and violence transforming him into a nearly invisible man. I'm halfway done with BOOTH and most likely will return this failure to the shelves of the library where, hopefully, it will be forgotten.

Although there are some compelling scenes in this book, and the plot points are clever (the idea of DW Griffith being interested in John Surratt to promote a film about Lincoln, and others), there are some very disturbing anachronisms that jar like the squeal of brakes in this novel. Such silly things that could have been checked and weren't such as 'stage right' when he means 'stage left' --or underexposed, when he means overexposed, or the use of words that hadn't been coined until 50 years later; such things make me just nuts to read BOOTH. The author knows his French: just about every detail having to do with something French is very correct. The author knows next to nothing about photography: just about every fine point of photography is utterly wrong, and since it is such a large part of the book, is a jarring and terribly discordant sense of place and expertise. However, the outline of the plot is clever, and as such is a good, light read.

The idea that John Surratt would have been forced to photograph his own mother's hanging is so 'out-there' that I don't think there's enough preparation for it, and as such it loses the audience.

And I guess I missed the part where John Surratt is known as a forger... where did that come from?

This rendering of the Lincoln assassination and it's prime player, John Wilkes Booth, takes an enormous amount of liberty with the actual facts of the assassination itself and with the people involved. The story is told from the point of view of John Surratt through clips of his diary a la Dracula, clips of actual testimony from his and the other co-conspirators trials intermingled with a narrative in 1915 around the time Birth of a Nation was being shown by D.W. Griffith. The Griffith angle has him trying to get Surratt to allow him to film him and use his journals to give the assassination part of his film more kick (and also to later use in his project about Lincoln , which was made in 1930).

I don't want to give a blow-by-blow recount of the novel, but give my impressions and opinions of it. I fear that the aspect that this book clearly overlooks is that John Surratt was a Confederate agent in the employ of the Confederate government to help it out in any way they saw fit. The journals that are presented in this book show that he was at best an unwilling participant in Confederate activity, his will bent by Booth. This simply is not the case. One need only reference Come Retribution, Blood on the Moon or The Lincoln Murder Conspiracires to see this egregious oversight.

While the author gives the caveat that he has played with history in his epilogue, I wish he would have put that in the prologue and spared me reading the novel. What I wanted, and expected, was a rendering of the events leading up to the assassination, the change in the plot from kidnapping to murder, and the actual assassination carried out through Booth's perspective (which one would think that the title suggests). Robertson didn't give us that. He gave us vague interpretations of the events leading to the assassination, leaving out some of the juiciest pieces the tale. Atzerodt's mishandling of the Andrew Johnson assassination is barely mentioned. The whole web of deceit that Booth wove was not fleshed out in a suitable enough fashion, at least for me. The Day Lincoln Was Shot by Jim Bishop gives a wonderful rendering of this tragedy in a more resounding way, although it is passed off as actual "history", than this novel does.

I will admit that Robertson did some clever dealings in the narrative, especially in the end with the photographing of the hanging of the four conspirators. However, I thought the meeting between Booth and Surratt on the night of the assassination was so over the top and contrived that I almost screamed with rage when I read it, as I did when Surratt has been captured and Alexander Gardner and Allen Pinkerton lay out the whole plot - who was involved and who did what - well before the authorities in Washington had any idea what had happened and who was responsible (with exception of Booth's participation).

This was an effort that just did nothing for me in the pantheon of Lincoln assassination lore, legend and history. Try Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, though. Great read with plenty of humorous anecdotes about more than just the act itself.

Just for information: the edition of this book that I am reviewing is not the large print 1988 edition listed by Amazon. It is a standard sized print edition published in 1998 by Doubleday's Anchor Books division.

The narrator is John Surratt, a real participant in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, a conspiracy which was led by John Wilkes Booth. As the author states in his "Sources and Acknowledgements" at the end of the book, his novel is essentially correct in all pertinent details, but has been "fictionalized" in ways that enhance the telling of the story.

The narrative is made up of interconnected excerpts earlier diary written from 1864 to 1865, and the diary of John Wilkes Booth written during the days between his murder of Abraham Lincoln and his (Surratt's) about two weeks later; excerpts from testimony in the trials of Mary Surratt (John's mother), shortly after the assasination, and that of John Surratt about two years later, after his capture in Italy and deportation to America.

__BOOTH__ opens with Surratt's first diary entry in 1916 written shortly after he has been contacted by famed early film pioneer D.W. Griffith who wants Surratt to collaborate with him in the making of a movie about the assassination of Lincoln. Surratt's collaboration would be extremely valuable because he has in his possession his own diaries from the asassination period and a number of photographs that could greatly enhance the movie.

This request from Griffith causes Surratt to reread his old diaries and look at his old photos for the first time in about 50 years. These diaries form the core of __BOOTH__.

If we are to believe Surratt's diary entries, he was a rather unwilling participant in the conspiracy, and until the very end, he believed that Booth intended to kidnap Lincoln, not to murder him. He also tells us that his mother, Mary Surratt, was not a part of the plot, and was only arrested because of "guilt by association."

John Wilkes Booth is presented as a very intelligent man who is extremely charismatic, and as one who seems to effortlessly charm everyone he meets, including both Surratt, his mother, and his sister.

The basic history of the events surrounding Booth's assassination of Lincoln in Ford's theatre in Washington, D.C. are well known.

Booth shot Lincoln in Lincoln's box in the theater, jumped to the stage, broke his leg in the jump but still managed to escape. He evaded capture for about two weeks, but was finally found hiding in a barn and shot and killed by a Union soldier.

Boooth's three major co-conspirators, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt were quickly captured along with Mary Surratt. Evidently, had Lewis Powell not been captured in Mary Surratt's boarding house Mary would never have been arrested, but arrested she was. She, along with the three true members of the conspiracy, was found guilty and hanged. The evidence against her, as given by one of her boarders, was that she had often been seen in the company of Booth, and that another of the conspirators, George Atzerodt had done gardening work for her. Questionable evidence of participation in a conspiracy, at best, but found guilty nonetheless.

John Surratt escaped to Europe, where he lived for two years before being returned to the U.S. and tried. He was not found guilty and was released and lived for another 50 years.

One of the major fictional devices that Robertson (the author used) was to make Surratt a photographer in the employ of Alexander Gardner, a famous Civil War photographer. Robertson says that he did this to more easily work in the photographs he has included in the book. Amongst other photos are several of Booth, one famous battlefield photo of a dead Confederate soldier, three gallows shots of the four prisoners, both before and after the hanging, and a photo of Sergeant Boston Corbett, the man who shot Booth. Also, there is no historical indication that the contact in 1916 between Surratt and Griffith ever happened, but it is a useful device to set up the whole novel

As is so often the case, there is no way in a short review to convey the emotional and dramatic impact that a good author can bring into play. I believe that David Robertson's novel does have these kinds of impacts on the readers of _BOOTH__, making the reading of this novel a positive reading experience along with being a learning experience.

The only good thing that I have to say about this book is that it led me to re-examine the non-fiction accounts of the characters involved in the assassination conspiracy. The factual material is far more interesting than anything Mr. Robertson twisted around to fit into his "novel." John Surratt's true story as a confederate courier (not photographic assistant to Mr. Gardner as this story has it) would make for a far more compelling story. I found it disturbing that for the story's sake, Mr. Robertson had a sexual affair go on between Booth and Mrs. Surratt. The true story of Mrs. Surratt's probable innocence would itself be worthwhile reading. I could go on with examples (but I won't). Don't waste your time or money on this book. If you are interested in John Wilkes Booth and the story of the assassination conspiracy, there are tons of fascinating non-fiction books out there on the subject.