Customer Reviews

The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Magnificent! Mr. Bahr has written a wonderful, poignant, personal view of how the brutality of the Civil War affected those that lived it. War is the ultimate of human endeavors; those who have been embraced by it are changed forever. Brutality on a grand scale that brings into question the essence of the human condition. Mr. Bahr reaches into the very soul of those who have witnessed the carnage and examines how their lives are changed forever. His character development was superb. His use of the pervasive darkness of that era was stunning in its portrayal. Men fought and died not for their nation but for their beliefs in their fellow comrades. Mr. Bahr is a genius at putting into words the timeless love of men and women who lived those desperate hours. War is terrible but man's belief in himself and those who he fights beside transcends the violence of the battlefield.
I highly recommend this classic novel for anyone who wants to briefly glimpse what it is like to taste, hear, smell, and feel the horrors of the battlefield. No gratuitous violence, although the graphic nature of battle is portrayed in all its ugliness. Mr. Bahr's trilogy of the civil war is the best I have ever read on how those that lived it, dealt with its horrors. He is a master at showing how the glories of the battlefield scared an entire generation for years after the guns went silent. A must read.

Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War, lamented that the Civil War never produced a great work of fiction until, possibly, William Faulkner's works. If anyone ever updates that book, the author may come to a happier conclusion with the works of Howard Bahr. Lost in the clamor over Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Bahr's novel of the Battle of Franklin, The Black Flower--published the same year as Frazier's fine book--was a taut, beautiful tale that I have recommended to readers for years as the best Civil War novel I know. The excellent follow-up book, The Year of Jubilo, carried the story of Yalobusha County's Confederate sons forward to Reconstruction. Now comes The Judas Field, proving that Bahr is not just our greatest Civil War novelist, but one of our greatest modern novelists, period. Others describe the particulars of the story below, so there is no need for me to do that here. Suffice it to say that with this book, Bahr's fictional world, stretching from Mississippi to the cotton gin at Franklin, is beginning to resemble Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. This body of work deserves ten stars.

Not a necessarily a civil war buff, I had to be encouraged to read this book on its literary merit versus content. As a result,an absolutely beautifully written novel was discovered. The horrors and atrocities of the Civil War are well done but not necessarily for shock value. Bahr's character development and ability to portray the postwar southern landscape are superb. The last 100 pages have to be one of the best pieces of southern fiction - or any fiction - written in recent years.
Lamar Nesbit, Jackson, MS

I had read Howard Bahr's "Black Flower" and "Year of Jubilo" and liked both. "The Judas Field", however is a literary leap. This is the story of Cass and Lucian Wakefield and their return to the site of the Battle of Franklin Tennessee twenty years after the fact to recover the remains of a friend's brother and father. Along the way Mr. Bahr tells the story of this and other engagements and the fate of several characters. He writes beautifully, and his descriptions of the horrors of war are gripping. Most of all, his treatment of the spirits of the dead sets this work apart from other great Civil War novels. "Killer Angels" and "Cold Mountain" are two that come to mind. His manner of moving forward and backward in time is so smooth and seamless, you are sometimes not sure whether you are witnessing an event during the war or twenty years later. In the same way, there are time you are not quite sure whether the characters are living or the ghosts of those who died in the battles. I hope to see this title among the nominees for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or both.

I have been a Howard Bahr fan since THE BLACK FLOWER, and now he has in this third novel written a fine portrayal of the burden of the Civil War on those who fought it and the ones who waited. Bahr is a master of description and his prose is poetic in its imagery. Anyone who thinks that war is noble must read Cass Wakefield's ever-present memories of the Battle of Franklin--his comrades who were blown to bits, the bloody ground, the maimed corpses, the futile stand by an army ill-equipped, starving, and threadbare. It was Franklin, Tennessee, but it could be Iraq. The reader should make a trip to the site of the battle and walk among the headstones in the little cemetery. There are ghosts there.

"The Judas Field" is about MEMORY! It's about the power of godawful human conflict to wharp, to mutilate, and ultimately to destroy human lives; the lives of those who have lived through the horror of it and "survived." But survived for what? Survived how? NO ONE who faced combat, who "saw the elephant," emerged from our nation's most horrendous conflict without deep scars that lasted for whatever years remained of his life. Bahr is a master at finding, recording and describing those who made it through and what the survival cost them. His descriptive capacity is superior! When I read his works I keep saying, "Yes, yes, that must have been the way it was." In "Judas field" he gives us alcoholism and drug addiction. He also gives us deeply sympathetic characters who desperately want to do the right thing, to care, to make things right somehow. There were probably lots of young men from Iowa and Indiana who went home to lives essentially unchanged from before the conflict. In the South this was certainly not the case. One in four southern men of military age was dead. Statistically, EVERY man who served in the Southern armies and was not killed was wounded. And the world they came home to was devastated beyond anything Americans have experienced since. McMurty says the South is about memory. He's right. Read Bahr's works to know why. "Black Flower" "The Year of Jubilo" and "Judas Field" will make Southerners of anyone. Even this tranplant.

I have been a Howard Bahr fan since The Black Flower, and The Judas Field did not disappoint. Strong character development and plot, but the real joy of reading Bahr is the sheer poetry in his language. If you want to know about the South - what the landscape is/was like, the heavy stones of defeat people have carried in their hearts for so long - read Howard Bahr

This is a great novel. I just happened to notice it in the book store three days ago and I decided to buy it. I finished it last night. It was very hard to put it down once I had started. Bahr writes a powerful story with characters whom you really begin to miss once you're done reading. After reading for a short while, I found myself easly sympathizing with the main character, Cass Wakefield. It is refreshing to see a work of literature about the War Between the States in which the author doesn't go out of his way to criminalize and demean Southerners in order to insure popularity of his work (i.e. the horrible piece of "literary sucking-up" and prejudicial misinformation known as 'Cold Mountain'). Bahr's work is truely a masterpiece of American and Southern literature. The last chapter could drive you a little crazy with the many elusions back and forth but that seems to be Mr. Bahr's style and only adds to the joy of reading the book.

This is the second one of Bahr's books I have read. I enjoyed The Black Flower, but I think this is the better book. In fact, this is a remarkably good book. Bahr has an uncanny ability to capture what I assume was the whole scene surrounding the Civil War. His accounts of the battles are memorable and his accounts of what must have been going on in the heads of the soldiers is excellent. The book is haunting. He doesn't sugarcoat the realities of the killing and suffering. I recommend it unconditionally not to just Civil War buffs, but to anyone who enjoys getting lost in great literature.

This completes a "trilogy" by Howard Bahr that in my opinion is more profound and moving than other more "popular" works about the Civil War. (Cold Mountain, anyone?) The Judas Field is so beautiful yet so powerful. The conclusion is completely ironic and significant. Wow. Words can't express how this book made me feel about the Civil War. This book just puts you there, in the middle of it all, and then shows you how difficult of a time people had after the conflict. I consider this to be fine literature, up there or superior to some of Faulkner's writings. (Yes, I do agree with the reviewer that said that there was a lot of bad language, but this language was always in the mouths of characters and not the narrator- the narrative voice is never overly grostesque, in fact it's the opposite- a beautiful voice of conflict, pain and endurance.)
I need to reread "The Black Flower" now.