What You Should Consider Reading Next

As I continue to research the complex issue of Sir Thomas Malory’s sources I’ve also been spelling myself with some contemporary fiction, in particular the new novel Youngblood by Matt Gallagher.  For once the manifold good reviews are accurate.  It’s an extraordinary book, even better than most of the critics are crediting.

The setting is Iraq, primarily Ashuriyah, just before the end of the American occupation.  The narrator is an army lieutenant and a platoon leader.  It is war fiction, and like the greatest works of that kind, from War and Peace to A Farewell to Arms to The Things They Carried, it is suis-generis in spite of the conventional linear structure of the narrative.  Initially, story is propelled  by a mystery, indeed that’s what it first appears to be, in spite of its surprising setting, and though Gallaher’s canvas is edged with multiple modernist and post-modernist conventions, they are properly seen  as much a part of the temporal setting as the desert and burning sun are part of the physical setting.  Gallagher has deeper, more interesting concerns:  the struggle to lead others in a context fraught with ambiguity and moral conflict, the interaction of disparate cultures and the nature of character itself.  They are some of the best and most important subjects for fiction and of course are timeless.

And he has a gift for creating memorable, engaging characters.  There are many and yet all are well differentiated and believable.  His narrator, in particular, is self-effacing, contemporary and interestingly self-conscious and perspicacious.  In that regard, he is reminiscent of Patrick Kenzie in Denis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro mysteries.  Gallaher also has a fine sense of scene.  I never find myself asking why a scene exists or if it has gone on too long.  Writers with such skill are sometimes called a writer’s writer and the epithet is well deserved in this case.  Here’s a favorite paragraph which shows just how good Gallagher’s writing is:

                I wanted to agree with him.  I wanted us to absolve ourselves of blame, deflect the accountability elsewhere.  I wanted to chalk up the ruin we’d wrought to something unknowable, like providence, or chance, or bureaucracy.  But something inside implored me not to.  That’s too easy, it said.  Be stubborn.  Fight for understanding.

Boy, I wish I’d written that last sentence.  Anyone who has ever led others with good will has felt that way.

Of course, because of my immediate concerns I can’t help but find myself juxtaposing and contrasting it to Le Morte d’Arthur but also Lermentov.  Gallagher’s Jack Porter’s situation has much in common with Pechorin’s, and they face similar dramatic issues and tensions in spite of their significant differences in character, particularly their moral values.  Indeed, the two make for a fine comparison of the way alienation expresses itself in occupying forces living within an alien Islamic culture.  There’s a very interesting and enjoyable critical essay there.

However, Malory, and other concerns call.  Suffice it to say, it may well be one of the very best novels to come out of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and, given the recent competition, that is saying a lot. The final words of Patton’s  war horse of a poem come to mind,

      So as through a glass, and darkly

      The age long strife I see

      Where I fought in many guises,

      Many names, but always me.

      And I see not in my blindness

      What the objects were I wrought,

      But as God rules o'er our bickerings

      It was through His will I fought.

      So forever in the future,

      Shall I battle as of yore,

      Dying to be born a fighter,

      But to die again, once more.

I should mention that I came to Youngblood via “The Hawaii Project” (www.thehawaiiproject.com) which not only recommended the book to me one morning but pointed me to a diverse set of reviews that convinced me I needed to read it.  It really is an exceptional way to find exceptional books.  I also feel a deep sense of appreciation for Mr. Gallagher for writing such an extraordinarily good book.

"War and Peace" and Mobile Phones

Heavy snow is blowing and swirling past my window this morning and I’m musing about why I consider “War and Peace” to be such a great novel.  It’s prompted, not just by the weather but also the BBC’s new television mini-series.

I’ve never read any formal literary criticism of the novel; I’ve never wanted to because the book speaks so directly to me. Here’s a famous passage, the conclusion of Prince Andrei’s experience of the Battle of Austerlitz.  Andrei has picked up a fallen Russian standard, rallied the retreating soldiers around him and is running, leading an improvised charge against the French line on foot:

            ‘What are they doing?’ thought Prince Andrei as he gazed at them. ‘Why doesn’t the red-haired gunner run away since he is unarmed? Why doesn’t the Frenchman stab him? He won’t get away before the Frenchman remembers his bayonet and stabs him…’

            And in fact another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to the struggling men and the fate of the red-haired gunner who had triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited him, was about to be decided.  But Prince Andrei did not see how it ended.  It seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of it was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he had been looking at.

            ‘What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,’ thought he, and fell on his back.  He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not, and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn, not at all as I ran,’ thought Prince Andrei ‘—not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!...’

In this single passage, you see the elemental, precision of the Iliad with the genius to make it subjective and so personal.  Then, without warning, the focus, the drama of the soldiers attempting to take the gun emplacement is ironically disrupted by the wound that crumples Andrei onto his back.  We and Andrei see the sky, remote, objective, implicitly beautiful with a single, perfect adjective, “lofty,” and yet we’ve moved more deeply into Andrei’s subjective experience with absolutely credible thoughts that are the heart of so much philosophy with echoes back to Ecclesiastes.  Yet it is still told with the same concrete, direct language.  It is as surprising and breath-stealing as the best turn in a Sherlock Holmes story and absolutely believable.  There are so many surprises: plain observation leading to subjective speculation spiraling into objectivity which is actually a deeper subjectivity of philosophical speculation. 

When I think of novelists, short story writers, poets and even historians who have written with terrible, fierce insight about war, Bierce, Remarque, Owen, T. E. Lawrence, Hemingway, Powers, Klay, and so many others, I see Tolstoy in them.

But this is only one passage:  Tolstoy writes with equal insight about family life, society, the equally fierce and complex struggles that women face.  These days, we applaud novelists for their world building, and rightly, too.  But sometimes we fail to recognize the same accomplishments in older works.  Tolstoy was writing fifty years after the events he chronicles.  Russian and French society had changed and were still changing, dramatically.  Yet, he succeeds in making his world detailed and complex as Tolkien’s and as visceral as Hemingway’s.

The new BBC series appears to have little time for philosophy and rumination.  It’s main characters simply don’t appear to think as much as their counterparts in the novel. Even though the production design feels absolutely authentic, I half expect all the young people at a ball to be surreptitiously texting on their mobile phones.

(The illustration is “The Battle of Borodino” by Leonid Pasternak, the original illustrator.)