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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An adventure story -- but much more, December 5, 2007
What role the Confederate Secret Services may have played in the assassination of Lincoln remains one of the great mysteries of the Civil War -- and probably an insoluble one, as Secretary of State Judah Benjamin burned most of the Service's papers before the Confederate government abandoned Richmond in April 1865.
This novel depicts how the idea of breaking the Union by assassinating its leader might have begun to take shape in the course of the tumultuous events which culminated in the failure of Lee's attempt to smash the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. Its strong dramatic movement flows out of the situation depicted in the meeting of Lee, Benjamin, and Jefferson Davis at the start. Confronted by the prospect of the South's being overpowered in a war of attrition, Lee is looking for his Napoleonic victory -- Benjamin to exploit divisions within the Union side. It is the old Machiavellian contrast of the Lion and the Fox, and the novel's protagonist, Claude Devereux, is caught between the two worlds. Reluctantly abandoning the straightforward path of the soldier, he travels back, across enemy lines, to his native Alexandria to work in the shadows, playing to the Unionists the role of the Southerner who is on their side, and so can validate their notions of what the conflict is about. And he manages with great success to 'burrow and bore his way into their inner circles like a tree boring insect working its way into the sapwood.'
He does this despite the fact that Unionist counter-intelligence officers are onto him almost from the start. Much of the excitement of the story comes from the way in which the description of the machinations and counter-machinations of the various players -- sometimes as much or more concerned with outscoring rivals on their own side as with defeating the enemy -- is interwoven with the story of the campaign.
All this makes for a gripping adventure story. But the novel is more than that. Followers of Colonel Lang's blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007, will know him as a particularly incisive commentator on military and foreign policy affairs. A central theme of his commentaries on current events -- the dangers of seeing what your ideological beliefs tell you should be there, rather than looking at what is actually there -- is at the heart of his novel. If Claude Devereux can both infiltrate the inner circles of the Unionists, and render ineffective the efforts of those who seek to expose him, this is largely because he exploits the need of the Unionist leaders to see the South in terms of ideological simplicities. They want to believe that their real enemy is the planter aristocracy, not that the white society of the South is united in seeing the North as attempting to impose an alien culture on them. And accordingly, they want to believe in Devereux.
At this point, the novel acquires decided contemporary resonance. It was precisely because so many wanted to believe in the vision of the oppressed Shia of Iraq waiting eagerly for deliverance from Saddam Hussein at the hands of the United States that Ahmad Chalabi was able to worm his way into the inner circles of the Bush Administration -- and use American power to further his own purposes, and those of the clerical regime in Tehran.
It is very evident Colonel Lang himself sees the Civil War as fundamentally a conflict of cultures, pitting a North Eastern culture, rooted in Puritanism, against the 'cavalier' culture of the South: so the American Civil War is in some sense a continuation of its English precursor. It is also very clear that his sympathies are with the Confederacy. For many Americans, obviously, the issues of the Civil War still carry an immense emotional charge -- in a way they do not for an Englishman like me. It is however not very sensible, in dealing with literature as in other matters, to forgo opportunities for enjoyment and instruction because one does not agree with the views of those providing them.
The Butcher's Cleaver is certainly not without blemishes -- it is the work of someone whose primary trade is war and intelligence, not novel writing, and sometimes lacks the fluency one would expect in a more practiced writer of fiction. It is however a work of very real imaginative power. It is the same gift of empathy which makes Claude Devereux so adept a practitioner of intrigue which enables his creator to draw on his own experience to create this memorable -- and ultimately rather terrifying -- character. Among a gallery of other striking characters, perhaps the most remarkable is Devereux's subordinate Isaac Smoot -- a professional soldier's portrait of a professional soldier.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Confederate Secret Service, December 5, 2007
Among the vast amount that has been written on the Civil War, little is to be found on the intelligence services of either side. "The Butcher's Cleaver" throws some interesting light on this understandably dark area. Pat Lang, a retired Colonel in military intelligence with considerable experience in the field of human intelligence, has produced a novel of the efforts of the Confederate service to penetrate the military planning of the North. Colonel Lang has a talent for reproducing the atmosphere of wartime Washington and the offices of bureaucracy found in the civilian and military corridors of power. He recreates the elements, even in the North, which opposed Lincoln and the Northern cause, doing what they could to coperate with the agents of Confederate secret intelligence. Woven throughout the story are actual figures from the North and South. It's a tale worth telling and Colonel Lang does a fine job of it. Highly recommended for those interested in the great conflict as well as those students of the craft of intelligence.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A poetic historical novel of the Confederacy, March 18, 2008
This review is from: The Butcher's Cleaver: (A Tale of the Confederate Secret Services.) (Paperback)
This a remarkable and a very unusual book, with those qualities being inseparable. In particular, there is its pervasive, perambulating, almost dreamlike air -- both in narration and description. That is, everything that its central character, Confederate agent Claude Devereux, takes note of (but not only Claude) is presented to us as though it were preserved in amber -- estimates of men and situations but also the then-existing "look" of things, natural and man-made. Of course, to capture or evoke the "then-existing" as it was then felt is the great yet elusive goal of historical fiction. In addition, a feel for, or a need to evoke, the "then-existing" implies a no less powerful sense that much of what existed then is lost. It is here, without ever becoming too explicit, that "The Butcher's Cleaver" is so poetic. Again, this is present in the most seemingly ordinary descriptive passages (as time seems to slow down a bit to allow Claude to notice the look of a street, a piece of architecture, etc.). After a while one begins to feel that that all this verbal and visual "touching" amounts to a continuous farewell on Claude's part, and not only because he almost certainly knows that his cause and way of life are doomed but also because we know (as he anticipates) what acts Claude himself will bring to pass after the span of the novel itself is completed. The perambulating, near dreamlike quality of the book comes to a climax in the scene where Claude and his brother Patrick observe Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Again, one would think that in the face of such a famous scene of "action" that the tempo of the writing would have to accelerate, but instead, if anything, it slows down a bit more, to convey what probably does occur in the minds of trained men who are observing combat but also to convey, in this case, their awed, horrified reluctance to take in what they cannot avoid seeing. Patrick, BTW, is a beautifully modeled character; his role in the double game the Devereux brothers are playing is at times almost heartbreaking.
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