Cold Mountain: part 3

So I've finally finished Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.  It took a lot longer than I meant it to but I enjoyed every minute of it.  I wont give the story away, that would take too much time anyway, but I would like to discuss the writing style.
The style this book is written in is unlike any book I've read.  For starters, you will find absolutely to direct quotations in the entire book.  All of the dialogue is written indirectly, or like this:
—Why did you never have any? Inman said.
—Just happened that way.
It's so unique and I find it fascinating that he would make a choice like that.  Perhaps he wants to maintain a sort of flow in the story by not bluntly separating the dialogue from the rest of the story, or perhaps he simply doesn't understand how quotation marks work (it's okay Charles Frazier, grammar is hard).  Either way, I think it's such a unique choice that really separates his writing from most styles.
Aside from his grammatical choices, Frazier has a gorgeous writing style.  He will take paragraphs to describe scenes in the most specific detail, but doesn't lose track of the story.  The story itself is set during the Civil War and life is hard, gritty, and dark.  There's so much death and suffering surrounding one of the main characters, but Frazier mixes the harshness of the story with beautiful surroundings of the land and the slow turning of the seasons.  One of my favorite passages clearly depicts the harshness of life during the time period and really strips the world of romanticism.  One of the main characters, Inman, has just watched a mother bear fall off a cliff and is contemplating what to do with her cub:
To his credit, Inman could imagine reaching up and grabbing the cub by the scruff of its neck and saying, We're kin. Then taking his knapsack off and thrusting the cub in with only its head sticking out. Then putting the pack back on and walking away, the bear looking about from this new perspective as bright-eyed as a papoose. Give it to Ada as a pet. Or if she turned him away, he might raise it to be a part-tame bear, and when full grown it might stop by his hermit cabin on Cold Mountain now and again for company. Bring its wife and children so that in years to come Inman could have an animal family if no other. That would be one way this dead bear calamity might be rectified. What Inman did, though, was all he could do. He picked up the LeMat's and shot the cub in the head and watched it pause as its grip on the tree failed and it fell to ground.
As terrible as it sounds, it shows a clear struggle of morality.  He wants to take the cub in as his own, but he knows that he also has to eat to survive.  I think this really captures the whole idea of the book and how ones own life matters much more than other wishes.
Overall, I think the book was written with gorgeous imagery and incredibly realistic characters.  It's a story about life that feels as though it should never end, but of course it has to.  I felt as though Frazier wrapped it up quickly and neatly but it lost its sense of harshness, and seemed a bit more like a "happily ever after".  However, the main body of the story is spectacular.  There's a kind of bluntness that Frazier writes with that makes the story and the characters seem so real.  There are struggles of morality as well as struggles of survival.  The story is beautifully crafted and detailed beyond belief.
If you like historical fiction or simply want to read some really great writing, I would seriously recommend this book.