Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Sceptre $98
For a best-seller, the pace of this book is bogged down by Charles Frazier's detail. Set in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, it tells of Inman, a deserter from a Confederate Army hospital in North Carolina who walks hundred of kilometres to his home on Cold Mountain. Inman's trek is contrasted with the spiritual journey of his melancholy fiancee, Ada. The art of descriptive writing is in choosing a few perfect details, but Frazier doesn't know where to stop. Do we really need to be told that a 'foul' river is 'opaque and unmarked', like 'molasses as it first thickens', 'a smear on the landscape' and more - all in the space of two paragraphs? Much of Frazier's writing is beautiful, but it's hard to get excited about a narrator who spends five pages describing the mud on his boots, rather than progressing the plot.
