Crofton's Fire
- Book Review,
by Keith Coplin
From Publishers Weekly
Coplin's debut novel soars well above most humdrum historical fiction, borne aloft by graceful prose, compellingly likable characters and a spirit of heartfelt humanity. West Point graduate (class of 1874) Lt. Michael Crofton begins his military career in earnest at Little Big Horn when he's sent over a nearby ridge to see what's going on with his commanding officer, Gen. George Armstrong Custer, and Custer's 260 troopers. ("We all disliked Custer, a braggart, a malefactor, a hound for glory. But, oh, the man cut a figure on horseback.") After a hairsbreadth escape from Crazy Horse, Crofton, the polar opposite of Custer in all ways except courage, embarks on a life of action and adventure. After being shot in the chest by a French whore he's attempting to rescue, he sees action on the steamy shores of revolutionary Cuba, shoots his way out of a Ku Klux Klan siege, toils behind a desk in Washington, D.C., and ends up fighting alongside gallant British comrades in the East African Zulu War. In combat as in life, Crofton always acquits himself with honor. Along the way he finds love, acquires an unusual bride, meets a gallery of luminaries (Generals Grant and Sherman among them) and lives a full and satisfying life. Author Coplin supplies his unassuming and modest hero with enough self-deprecating humor and honesty to keep him from being too unrelentingly perfect. Readers accustomed to more formulaic shoot 'em ups may find the novel less than riveting, but those who care about fine writing and a satisfying story will find all of that and more in these pages. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Is there a place these days for a novel like Crofton's Fire? Randy Wayne White -- a fine thriller writer -- does Keith Coplin an inadvertent disservice by likening this book to Little Big Man and Catch-22. Such dust-jacket comparisons lead to high expectations. But this quiet, very readable story of a young American army officer in the 1870s simply lacks the imaginative range or the verbal fireworks of those two modern classics. Instead what one finds is a tale by turns mildly comic, a little contrived, gently if determinedly critical of military grandeur and governmental callousness, and never particularly surprising. In other words, Crofton's Fire is the sort of book that, in years gone by, one might pick up off a library shelf, flip through and check out for a week or two. Novels like this -- neither ground-breaking nor generic -- were once the mainstay of a fiction-reading public. A good read. But ours is now so thoroughly a blockbuster nation that the chief virtue of any book, film or exhibition is Spectacle. Our tastes have coarsened. New romantics, we want to be astonished, awed, overwhelmed by son et lumière. But just as Crofton's Fire critiques war's supposed gloriousness, so it also resists an obvious flamboyance. Coplin's novel -- his first -- opens with West Point graduate Michael Crofton observing the massacre of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. As usual, Custer is a vainglorious, charismatic lout; he ends up being shot by his own soldiers when they realize that he has led them into a massacre. Shortly afterward, Crofton must himself lead a troop into a small Western town to settle a "Whore's War" between the local citizens and some Texas cowboys. Seems Charolais, the town's prostitute, defended her honor and killed one of the Texans. This incident soon escalates and results in yet another massacre. "The only unique aspect of the Lemon Corner donnybrook," Crofton observes after interrogating a mortally wounded boy, "was the willingness of these men not only to kill to keep Charolais, but to die to keep her. "This approached something sacred, something almost patriotic, and in an absurd way, it was to be admired. The tone of the boy's voice, the menacing look in his cloudy eyes, these features spoke of commitment, the will to sacrifice one's self to a higher cause. Whore or not, the woman at the heart of all this bloodletting was, only in a matter of degree, different from Menelaus's Helen, and the epic slaughter of Lemon Corner was of the kind of Troy, only smaller." Crofton's tone is easygoing, just slightly formal (as is appropriate to the age he writes about) and reflective. (However, I do think those commas around "only in a matter of degree" reverse the intended meaning. A better construction would be "the woman at the heart of all this bloodletting wasn't, except in a matter of degree, different from Menelaus's Helen.") We soon relax and enjoy listening to Crofton relate his youthful adventures, which include a deadly skirmish with the Ku Klux Klan, a secret mission to Cuba and bloody battles in Africa against the Zulu. The young officer invariably performs well and bravely, always doing his duty. Along the way, he trades quips with his drunkard sergeant, comes to love his bumbling fellow officer Sorensen, feels pity for Indians and Africans, admires the unflappable courage of the imperialistic British. Yet this career soldier isn't at all gung-ho or jingoistic. In fact, he is at heart a family man, admiring his parents, utterly infatuated with his beautiful wife, devoted to their young children. It doesn't take a reader long to suspect that Keith Coplin means for us to draw analogies between the 1870s and more modern wars. In Vietnam, according to urban legend, grunts might shoot their stupid officers; the CIA ran guns to Cuba and planned to assassinate Castro; ethnic conflicts of gut-wrenching horror and violence are with us still. In Michael Crofton we are meant to see a sensible, decent man manipulated by the foolish and callous, the entrepreneurial and sentimental, all those romantic cowboys who think of war as a kind of boys' game. Hence the comparisons to Little Big Man and Catch-22. At one point in his career, Crofton oversees Arlington National Cemetery."All of this," he tells his friend Sorensen, "this empty ground, crammed full of corpses. There will be men like you and me tending graves ad infinitum. And when this ground is full, they'll find more ground. And the whole world, farmland, ranchland, land where there are houses now, will be one huge cemetery." He pauses, then adds, "And all the dead will be honored." So, will Crofton's Fire find a few readers? It should. But remember it's merely a good book, no more, in a time when being just a good book is seldom quite good enough. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Coplin, a 60-year-old first novelist, has roared out of the gate with all cylinders firing. His debut is a soldier's story, part Tim O'Brien, part James Jones, but with the underlying humor of Little Big Man. It begins with a simple sentence, "Something had gone terribly wrong," spoken by Second Lieutenant Michael Crofton, who just misses Little Big Horn but watches in horror as (in this version) Custer's own men turn their guns on their foolhardy commander. As the novel follows Crofton through skirmishes with a sharpshooting prostitute, a gang of frontier KKKers, and on to bigger battles, first in Cuba and then in Africa during the Zulu war, the point of view never swerves from the individual soldier in the chaos of battle, torn between the overpowering impulse to stay alive and the need to do his job and not let down his fellow soldiers. That dilemma is at the heart of all good war novels, of course, but Coplin manages to translate it into terms both utterly fresh yet disarmingly ordinary. The novel isn't quite as sharp when it moves away from the battlefield to Crofton's family life, but even when addressing more subtle relationship issues, Coplin keeps the narrative hurtling forward in overdrive. This rambunctiously entertaining mix of western and war novel is brutally realistic when it needs to be but also has room for humor and a bit of romance. A resounding success. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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