Confederates by Thomas Keneally
Published 1979 · 427 pages · 106,750 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is Confederates to read?
Confederates scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Keneally uses period-appropriate Civil War vocabulary—military terms, Southern dialect, Irish and German immigrant speech. Context makes meanings clear.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Solid, well-crafted prose that balances readability with literary quality. Keneally writes clearly while capturing the chaos of battle.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Grounded in the physical experience of war—marching, waiting, fighting. Larger themes emerge through accumulated experience rather than statement.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Multiple characters and storylines require tracking, along with Civil War history. The density is appropriate to the scope.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Keneally shows the war from multiple perspectives without judging. You understand the soldiers through what they do and endure.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The battle itself becomes symbolic of the war is larger meanings. Individual characters represent different aspects of the conflict.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Keneally maintains authorial distance, observing all sides with compassion. The irony is historical—we know what they cannot know.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The novel builds toward Antietam and its aftermath. War provides no clean resolutions; survivors continue into uncertain futures.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Multiple storylines converge on the battlefield. The ensemble structure tracks several characters through the same historical event.
How Confederates is regarded
Confederates holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.