The Complications of Colour

The Tinsmith, Tim Bowling’s fourth novel, is a provocative, ambitious, exciting story. It opens on September 17, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland: 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished that day, the bloodiest in American history. Anson Baird, a young Union surgeon pushed to the point of exhaustion, treats casualties in hellish, unsanitary conditions while Confederate artillery shells fall around him “like cord upon cord of wood being unloaded.” Nearby, a grisly pile of amputated limbs, much of it his doing, grows in similar fashion. Our senses are soon overwhelmed by the carnage, which Bowling describes most effectively by way of contrast, the sweet scent of alfalfa, for example, set against the stench of “chloroform, blood, and manure,” or the beauty of a bucolic river valley belying the ever-present danger of hurtling Minié balls. Anson imagines a nearby turnpike “stretched taut in the dawn air, like a dew-dripping thread with two...