Collateral damage

The brutality of the Union's program to quell rebellion was shocking to people on both sides of the war and devastating to the many dispossessed civilians who wanted nothing to do with the conflict or the South's "peculiar institution." Particularly appalling to mid-19th-century mores was the Union's policy of arresting women in an effort to deprive the rebels of their domestic labor.

With Adair, Jiles has created a stirring heroine, a courageous, sarcastic young woman inflamed by the injustice wreaked upon her but forced to negotiate with a system that's overwhelming. The St. Louis women's prison is a place of jungle law with disorienting touches of genteel civility. Women who survive battles with fellow prisoners and their warden suffer the consequences of long-term exposure to tuberculosis. But Adair endures: "This was all something that just had to be got through," she thinks. "It wasn't permanent, being a thief and alone and being stuck in this awful hell of coal smoke and brick." In the darkest moments, she prays only for God's benign neglect: "Lord, I'd rather you didn't pay attention to me one way or the other if you don't mind."

How subtly Jiles introduces the romance between Adair and her interrogator, Major Neumann. A man of deeply felt principles, Neumann longs to escape the miserable task of extracting confessions from these poor women, but Adair's proud resistance inspires a degree of respect that continues to grow during their sessions. Soon, he's pleading with her to confess something - anything, make something up if necessary - so that he can help her get out. Her unwillingness to compromise herself only secures his devotion.

This unlikely romance is powerfully charged by restraint on their part and the author's. (Are you listening, Hollywood?) As their bodies are ravaged by war and disease, their love for one another sustains them on separate journeys that are sometimes breathtakingly harsh. Major Neumann eventually realizes "that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid. Even when the heat of the lantern itself burnt away the illusions and a black hole appeared in the middle of the slide."

Jiles's steely style never wastes a word across this cold mountain of desperation. In the stunned silence of what she's endured, "Adair knew there were many others also who had hoarded their light against all trouble and all assault and had gone down into darkness as well, without a word spoken and their names were known to no one. You would think this could not be true but it was."

If there's a ray of hope by the end, it's not the advent of dawn, but starlight perfectly captured.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail to charlesr@csmonitor.com.

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