Jeff Bursey review of BTM-2

Over at the Big Other, the Canadian novelist Jeff Bursey offers a substantive review of BTM-2, including its treatment of The Red Wheel.

“The pages spent discussing The Red Wheel’s aesthetics and objectives, as well as the labour behind it, are likely to be identifiable and fascinating to many writers. Always present is the struggle to shape the immense number of ideas, real-life personages, and incidents into a cogent narrative while resisting demands from the outside world:

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Fortunately, fate has decreed that, while following my basic inclination, I also have to remain silent; to take The Red Wheel on further. These many years of silence, of inaction, of less action—even if I’d tried I couldn’t have planned it better. It’s also the best position tactically, given the current distribution of forces: for I am almost alone, but my adversaries are legion.

I’ve plunged into The Red Wheel and I’m up to my ears in it: all my time is filled with it, except when I sleep (and even at night I’m woken by ideas, which I note down). I stay up late reading the old men’s memoirs and am already nearing the end of a complete read-through of what they’ve sent. Over their many pages, the writing sometimes shaky, scratchy now, my heart gives a lurch: what spirit, in someone approaching eighty—some of them ninety—years of age, unbroken by sixty years of humiliation and poverty in emigration—and that after their excruciating defeat in the Civil War. Real warrior heroes! And how much priceless material is preserved in their memories, how many episodes they’ve given me, bits and pieces for the “fragments” chapters—without them, where would I have found this? It would all have vanished without trace.

When I had, in the first draft, assembled the material and made sure I had what was needed for the vast mass of the four-volume March—that is, of the February Revolution itself—I went backwards, to August and October, to fine-tune them into their definitive form. This was also no minor task, for over the last four or so years of rummaging through archives and memoirs, how many new depths I’d encountered in the weave of events, and many places demanded more and more work—changing and rewriting. And yes, I do understand that I am overloading the Wheel with detailed historical material—but it is that very material that’s needed for categorical proof; and I’d never taken a vow of fidelity to the novel form.
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The steadfastness required to finish a novel is often stated but not so often expressed in a way that makes you feel the effort required or that’s as encouraging for one’s own resolve. Reading this volume on that topic one sees, even more than in the first volume, how this series of novels is about ensuring that history is not left to moulder or to be forgotten. I won’t say The Red Wheel is an essential work, as nothing is unless a reader deems it so; but it is essential for me.”