SOURCE: “A Unique and Haunting Vision of Wartime Chaos and Death,” in Chicago Tribune, December 7, 1998, p. 3.

In the following review, Gallagher offers favorable assessment of Master Georgie.

In this short, melancholy tale, British novelist Beryl Bainbridge all but reinvents the historical genre. Gone are moments of derring-do; gone, too, any notions of simple, linear plot. In their place, Bainbridge delivers a fitful, episodic story of death, disease and unfulfilled longing.

The Master Georgie of her title is George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer in England during the 1840s and '50s. He is assigned to the British army during its disastrous adventure in the Crimea in Britain's mid-19th Century war against Russia.

Like American writer Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain, Bainbridge is more interested in war as background than in war itself. Battles are mere eruptions of violence in a landscape already strewn with victims of...