this is a book with massive temporal and geographical scope, but it doesn't formally ever really reflect that. it's efficient, and fairly brief, and has a limited cast of characters, and is composed of a sequence of  distinct events, between which much intermediary time is skimmed past, so it's hard to ever get a handle on the size of the story. and i wouldn't say the characters are underdeveloped or anything, but given how much in-story time is spent with them, i feel like i don't know them that well. all this is a shame: i'd like the breadth of the story to fill the huge landscapes we're sometimes told it occurs in.
the language is lush and notable: i took a whole bunch of notes. it's really very gorgeous. it perhaps doesn't reach the precision and opulence of, perhaps, tom sawyer or the shipping news, but the fact those are even comparitive is notable. (an odd pair of choices: twain came to mind because of the period, proulx because that's my standard for short, beautiful sentences.)
am ended up very fond of the narrator, and found the sort of revelation he comes to towards the end very tender, moving, surprising. what is it about stage performance in historical fiction, to make it provide such a consistent way of unlocking genders and relationships? this, and tipping the velvet, and even, ish, stage beauty come to mind from my immediate canon. i mean, i know why, but i would like to read more on it, as well as of it.
two brief complaints. 1) i found the battle scenes throughout a little numbing, and there's a lot of them. i understand their place in the book, why they're where it descends into detail and present tense, but i struggled a little. 2) this is a book that deserves a smaller font size: honestly that might have helped me expect less scope. i always hate how big the font is (how big the books are) in recently published novels, but when it’s a historical one too, it just feels wrong.
ultimately, i think this is a really smart, interesting book, slightly let down by packaging which doesn't articulate why, what it's properly about. so, here’s my sense of the heart of it. it's about the cage of being a soldier, and how that clashes and meshes with the silences (?) of queerness, in a country and landscape which is opening up, into freedom and hostility, kindness and bloodshed. as the book considers in its final pages. in that end, it is very twain. huckleberry finn, this time.