Traveller

I read this as part of a book club and it's one of those books that has stayed with me for a long time. I remember a lot of the people from the book club did not like it, but I found the story very interesting. Perhaps it's my love of horses?

Traveller is General Robert Lee's horse and tells the

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tale of some of the things he did during the Civil War, and life at that time from a horse's perspective.

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Horse to Robert E. Lee, you'd probably have privy to moments like no other possible entity in that historical niche, right? I tend to like stories told by animals...

The Civil War as told through the eyes of General Lee's horse, Traveller. Unique idea, very long book. This probably would have been a great short story, but there is only so much a horse can observe and comment in and this quickly became very repetative. I must say that this book is the only I've

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ever read told from the Southern POV and in that respect it certainly opened my eyes.

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I really did not like this book. I'm going to have to reread Watership Down to remind myself that Adams can be a good author. Part of it is that I am _not_ a Civil War buff - perhaps if one were, one would enjoy reading the war narrated by a horse. I spent most of the book as confused about the

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bigger picture as Traveller was. Then there were a lot of very strange choices made by the author - from having Traveller speak in heavy dialect (he mentions getting help with it, in the acknowledgements), to the peculiar paragraphs scattered throughout (mostly as chapter headers) written in the (somewhat florid) style of the period, in present tense, but with future knowledge ("This siege...is to last for nine and half months, until the beginning of April, 1865."). Having most (not all) of the generals referred to by nicknames (Red Shirt, Cap-in-his-eyes, Jine-the-Cavalry...) only made the whole thing more confusing. Traveller's language and understanding waver randomly - he starts out referring to "bangs", later starts calling them "guns", then randomly switches back and forth between the terms. He never does learn a name for flags or "colors" - calls them "cloth on sticks" throughout, except once. I don't know. It just did not work for me at all - not the characters (which were pretty faintly sketched in), not the events (as I said above, I never knew what was going on or why - which is, I suppose, appropriate for a war narrated by a horse...), not the language. Oh, and racism in language too - not in the story, just in how Adams-through-Traveller referred to the "black fellas" or later "darkies" serving the white folk. Again, appropriate for the times - but could just as easily have been left out, like Traveller's dialect. The rabbits didn't speak broad Yorkshire, and it made them richer characters that they didn't. I can't complain that the "black fellas" didn't get more depth as characters, because neither did anyone else, including "Marse Roberts" (General Lee). So I was mostly bored except when I was annoyed - not something I'm pleased to have read (except in the sense that I'm done, and never have to read this again!), and certainly not something I'd ever reread.

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