Damn fools make great protagonists, particularly in satirical novels. Their naïveté allows the reader to gain experience alongside them, and their cluelessness ensures that said experience will be funny as hell, too ... Refreshingly original. Here is an author capturing, with clarity, our current moment by flashing us back to the past. Dayle’s deft portrayal of American anti-Blackness, class exploitation and cultural uncertainty feels both accurate to the novel’s 19th-century setting and, soberingly, very contemporary.
The well-researched period details are occasionally juxtaposed with startling digressions, but the few anachronisms do not matter and are clearly intentional. This is not history as fact but history as fable. How To Dodge a Cannonball is satire at its funniest and most pointed, skewering good intentions and bad with equal ferocity.
This is not the typical Civil War novel, but the dark humor and commentary on race, class, and the American experiment in the midst of its biggest test make for an entertaining, thought-provoking read.
While Cannonball is exaggerated in comedy, character behavior, and a style not perfectly suited to the 1860s (at one point the narrator discusses Anders’s id, ego, and superego), it is especially in this last quarter of the novel that the story becomes marked historical fiction. There are some suggestions of an alternate history earlier—Anders seems to reference George III of England being killed during the American Revolution—but it’s only in this final quarter that a strange opportunity enters the narrative, like one of Gleason’s theatrical pieces come to life.
