HarperCollins £12.99 pp280

Mr March, as readers of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic children’s story, will remember, is the father of four daughters and husband to Marmee, the Martha Stewart of 19th-century Massachusetts. An army chaplain, he spends most of the book off ministering to the Union troops in the American civil war, returning only to play the starring role in the grisly closing scenes of Alcott’s novel: “There never was such a Christmas dinner as they had that day!” In March, Geraldine Brooks creates a life for this archetypal absent father.

The novel opens with March writing the kind of sermonising letter that the little women adore. He has run out of ink, he writes, but they mustn’t worry, for one of the men has shown him how to make some more out of crushed blackberries, and “so am I able to send ‘sweet words’ to you!” How the little women’s hearts would have leapt on reading this. How this reader’s sank. Thankfully, it turns out that, far from manufacturing homemade Quink, March is actually sitting in the aftermath of a rout, dazed and exhausted, surrounded by dying men and watched by an optimistic vulture (the vulture being a good example of Brooks’s inability to resist adding just one more egg to every pudding). Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, Mr March is struggling to produce a “few rote words of spousal longing”. The letters are an irony that Brooks encourages us to enjoy.

The novel gives March an exciting biography. The minister is confirmed in his abolitionism after a youthful erotic encounter with an educated slave girl, Grace, whom he will meet again in the course of the war. The scenes between Grace and March — and indeed between most of Grace’s compatriots and March — are not the highlight of the book, largely because Brooks seems worried that because she is writing about slaves we might imagine that she, too, is nursing horrible racist fantasies. This means that nearly all of March’s black characters are wearingly lovable. The novel is most alive when re-creating battles. March becomes involved in some seriously bloody engagements before finally fetching up in a filthy Washington hospital. Even then his trials aren’t over, for he still has to recover enough strength to make it home for his reprise of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Brooks’s considerable historical research for March is pleasingly lightly worn. She is generous in her acknowledgments, even taking a moment to apologise to her husband “for all the times I refused to get out of the car at Antietam or whined about the heat at Gettysburg”.

Her efforts have borne a rich fruit: in common with other historical novels, March is lavish with the adjectives and ladles on the sadism — each unjustly whipped slave, each battlefield amputation is treated with the kind of weirdly loving attention to detail that characterises the work of Sebastian Faulks, among others. For all that, it is a big, generous romp that manages to make clever use of Little Women without suffocating beneath it.

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