Patrick O’Brian died in 2000, just after completing the twentieth novel in his wildly popular Aubrey-Maturin series. Though it took time for the books to gain renown, at his death three million copies had sold worldwide, and O’Brian had been lionized as heir to Melville’s genius. Today, newsletters and chat rooms devoted to his books abound, and there are volumes printed to explain his difficult terminology.
Source:
Dean H. King. Patrick O’Brian—A Life Revealed. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2001.
Shadows of War:
All Quiet on the Western Front,
by Erich Marie Remarque
We live in the shadow of war. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Africa, hatred seeps across borders of nations, and the nightly newscast is never without a report of battles and bloodshed. Though we advance in every way as a civilization, mankind cannot seem to progress past war. National interests, greed, religious fanaticism, and ethnic hatred are some causes of war, but its effect is always personal: the devastation of the individual, the breaking up of the family, and the loss of that most precious gift, life. One young man who weathered some of the worst fighting of the First World War attempted to recreate his experience through fiction. All Quiet on the Western Front deals specifically with the first World War, but because of its unique perspective one feels that it could be about any war at any time in history.
Synopsis
Remarque opens his novel with a simple, two sentence declaration that sets the quiet tone of the narrative and alerts us that we are in for a different kind of war novel: “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” (1)
All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a young man, Paul Baumer, full of ideals and enthusiasm, who is inspired by his professor to enlist in the German army, along with his seven classmates. Told in the first person, the novel draws us gradually through Paul’s eyes into the horrendous world of the front, where with him we experience every form of death, disease and despair. This is no heroic saga (John Wayne will not be appearing) but only the tragedy of young men forced into a nightmare they did not create and cannot comprehend. The novel ends with the end of the war, and closes Paul’s story in a tragic, and curiously ironic manner.
Did You Know?
In 1933, the Nazis banned and burned Remarque’s works, and issued propaganda stating that he was a descendant of French Jews. Ten years later, the Nazis arrested his sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had remained in Germany with her husband and two children. Though Remarque had escaped, the Nazis executed his sister in retribution for Remarque’s outspoken criticism of Hitler’s regime.
What Makes it Great?
It is difficult to absorb the statistics of the First World War. More than sixty-four million men fought, representing nations from northern Europe to northern Africa, western Asia and the United States. Over twenty-one million were wounded, and eight million soldiers died, along with over six million non-combatants. It was the first modern war, meaning that soldiers faced, for the first time, such threats as tanks, U-boats, poison gas, and attacks from the air. Yet it was ultimately a war fought in the trenches, hand-to-hand, by young men hardly out of their teens. An entire generation was drawn into a conflict that left its survivors traumatized and alienated. The greatness of this novel lies in its ability to bring us into a reality that we could otherwise never even imagine. Here we descend into the muddy trenches with these boys, as they await a bombardment.
“We wake up in the middle of the night. The earth booms. Heavy fire is falling on us. We crouch into corners. We distinguish shells of every calibre.
“Each man lays hold of his things and looks again every minute to reassure himself that they are still there. The dug-out heaves, the night roars and flashes. We look at each other in the momentary flashes of light, and with pale faces and pressed lips shake our heads . . . When a shell lands in the trench we note the hollow, furious blast is like a blow from the paw of a raging beast of prey. Already by morning a few of the recruits are green and vomiting. They are too inexperienced.” (105-6)
A Lost Generation Finds a Voice
This is a gritty, unsettling, and beautiful book. The horrifying details of death are interspersed with passages of pure poetry. Take for example, a typical moment where Paul lies, face down in the mud, in the middle of an attack, and offers this beautiful description of the earth:
“To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever.” (280)
These young German soldiers have been taught to hate their Russian enemies, and Paul is surprised when he lives in close proximity to some prisoners of war to find that they are so similar to his own kind. He is, in fact, sorry to see them starving and suffering.
“Only the dregs [of the soup] that the ladle cannot reach are tipped out and thrown into the garbage tins. This thin miserable dirty garbage is the objective of the prisoners. They pick it out of the stinking tins greedily and go off with it under their blouses.
“It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have faces that make one think—honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands and thick hair. They ought to be put to threshing, reaping and apple picking. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland.” (189-90)
When All Quiet on the Western Front debuted as a film, Variety magazine commented that the League of Nations should “buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language to be shown to every nation every year until the word war is taken out of the dictionaries.” Unfortunately, no voice, no matter how impassioned, seems capable of holding back the tide of war. Less than a decade after the publication of this book, World War II began. Beaten and weary, Paul sums up the experience of a generation that longed to be heroes and learned instead that war is the worst disease of all.
“Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.” (271)
The courage and resilience of the soldiers in this and every war is inspiring, and a reminder that one of the only benefits of war is the bravery and brotherhood it inspires. I chose to include this anti-war novel along with the seafaring stories and the adventures of the Count, because something about our love of “action stories,” makes me uneasy. Isn’t “action” just a nice way of saying that somebody is going to get killed? Researchers tell us that the average American child will witness 8000 murders on television by the time he or she reaches maturity. We love action movies, novels, and thrilling stories in newspapers and magazines, yet most of us have never really been in a war, or even in the presence of death. While it’s great to love a good action novel, it’s also important to remember that there is a grim reality behind all that action, with consequences that reach through generations.
Quotations taken from All Quiet on the Western Front. Ballantine Books, New York. 1996.
Talk About It
Some novels celebrate the glory of war. All Quiet on the Western Front is not one of those. The protagonist wishes only to be relieved of the incessant suffering and meaningless banality of the soldier’s life. Is it ever right to go to war? Would you send a child into battle and, if so, for what cause?
About the Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was born on June 22, 1898, into a German working-class family. At age eightee
n, Remarque was conscripted into the army, and in June of 1917 he transferred to the Western Front—the “contested armed frontier” between lands controlled by Germany to the East and the Allies to the West. Six weeks later, after being wounded with shrapnel in his left leg, right arm, and neck, Remarque was repatriated to an army hospital in Germany, where he spent the rest of the war.
Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front in a few months in 1927, but he was not immediately able to find a publisher. When the anti-war novel was at last published in 1929, it touched a public nerve and created a storm of political controversy. It sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. H.L. Mencken called it “unquestionably the best story of the World War.”
Remarque left Germany in 1931. He bought a villa in Porto Ronco, Switzerland, and lived both there and in France until 1939, when he left Europe for the United States with his first wife.
Over subsequent decades Remarque wrote books, plays, screenplays, and essays, many of which were very successful. One Austrian screenplay told of Hitler’s final days in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery. He married the Hollywood actress Paulette Goddard in 1958 and they remained married until his death in Switzerland on September 25, 1970 at the age of 72.
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 56: German Fiction Writers, 1914-1945. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by James Hardin, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 222-241.
Action Figures: Take it Personally
Who was the first action hero? Well (even though he was a little slow to get going) when it comes to action, nobody has more to say than Hamlet, that moody fellow with whose words this chapter began. In fact, in order to understand any great novel it helps to understand how the creation of fictional characters was revolutionized by the creation of Hamlet.
Before Shakespeare’s time there were stories and plays, but it was Shakespeare who created the first really round, complex, confusing characters that continue to intrigue us after hundreds of years. Scholar Harold Bloom summarizes Shakespeare’s contribution to all the literature that follows in terms of character development:
“Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves.” (Harold Bloom, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, p. xvii)
The way we experience Hamlet’s character development is through his soliloquies. Everybody can quote at least the first two lines of “To be or not to be,” but perhaps you haven’t thought about how revolutionary that particular moment in drama was. We don’t just watch Hamlet, we hear his thoughts and share his inner as well as his outer life. We agonize with him over every choice and challenge. This remarkable idea of entering into the inner life of a character laid the foundation for the fiction we read today. As Hamlet agonizes over whether or not to act we can see the structure of the modern novel being built. Experiencing the inner lives of characters helps to raise the level of these action stories to great literature.
Chapter Seven
Through the Eyes of a Child
The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool. These seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.
Chanakya
The question for the child is not, “do I want to be good?” but “whom do I want to be like?”
Bruno Bettleheim
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So many books have been written for children, but few have been written about them that stand the test of time. Charles Dickens was a pioneer in this area, and two of his novels represent the first attempts to look at life through the eyes of a hungry, homeless child. The counterpoint to these is the sweet fairy tale of Silas Marner, which shows us what the transformational effect of a child can be on an empty, self-centered soul.
Wanting More: Oliver Twist,
by Charles Dickens
In 1837 two figures rose to power in England whose influence would change the world. The diminutive Queen Victoria was crowned, and Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist, his second novel and the first to be serialized in his own publication. Its immediate popularity catapulted Dickens to fame. Along with The Christmas Carol it is still the most familiar of his novels; its charming, melodramatic plot has been adapted into numerous plays and musicals. The story of the little orphan who is reunited, then separated from, then reunited with with a kind grandfather after countless perils, caught the imagination of Victorian society and has remained a favorite ever since.
Oliver Twist was the first English novel to take a child as its protagonist. Up until Dickens’s day, novels were written about people with money, education, and usually good breeding. Dickens chose to view the world through a lens that was unfamiliar to those who bought books; he looked through the eyes of a bright, though helpless child, trapped in a terrible situation. It was a viewpoint he remembered well. Dickens himself was sent by his parents at the age of twelve to work in a blacking factory in the middle of London, when his father became so mired in debt he was forced to take the child out of school. Charles lived alone in a rented room and nearly starved on the meager wages he earned for standing in the window of a blacking factory, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish. Though within a year his father was able to bring him home again, the terror and humiliation of that experience was so great that Dickens kept it a secret from everyone (even his wife and children) all of his life. He dealt with it instead through his fictional children, particularly Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and used them to awaken a generation to the plight of the dispossessed.
Synopsis
Oliver Twist, born in a London workhouse in the 1830’s, is an unfortunate child. He spends the first nine years of his life miserable and hungry, and when he finally summons the courage to ask for more gruel during a meal, he is farmed out as an apprentice to an undertaker, where he suffers further abuse. Oliver is small but gutsy, and runs away to London. There he is taken up by the Artful Dodger, budding thief and protégée of Fagin, who runs a criminal gang made up of homeless boys like Oliver. Drawn unwillingly into a life of crime, Oliver develops a deep affection for the prostitute Nancy, mistress to Bill Sykes, local psychopath and much-feared associate of Fagin and his gang.
Oliver’s mother had been a gentlewoman who got into trouble and died on the streets, and by a Dickensian coincidence Oliver ends up being taken in by her father’s best friend. His happiness with them is shortlived; Sykes and Fagin steal him back, and after all the usual plot machinations the action culminates in the death of Nancy, the capture and defeat of Fagan, and the death of Bill Sykes. Oliver eventually ends up in the bosom of his mother’s family, safely home at last.
What Makes it Great?
After Shakespeare, Dickens may be the greatest writer in the English language. For sheer mastery of description, characterization and ingenious plot development, he simply cannot be surpassed. Each novel shows us facets of his greatness, but the most impressive quality to me in this work is the tone. Still in his twenties and largely self-educated, we can see Dickens teaching himself to write in this second novel, finding his voice and unique style. In contrast to the light comic subject matter of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist deals with the most disturbing, heart wrenching topics imaginable: homeless, defenseless children abused and exploited by criminals, unwanted pregnancies, prostitution, crime and the disease-ridden slums that abounded in London. Dickens was actually writing the end of one novel as he began the other, and would follow a similar pattern for decades, overlapping and interweaving the comic and the serious, the sardonic and the sentimental. So, rather than taking a heavy, serious approach to a weighty subject, Dickens keeps the lighthearted tone of Pickwick—the opening scene is so lighthearted in tone
that it could be describing a day on the skating pond rather than the tragic birth of an unwanted child and the death of his mother—and somehow this prevents the narrative from descending into pathos. It is a stroke of genius that draws us in and keeps us engaged. Here is the description of Oliver’s birth:
“Although I am not disposed to maintain that being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could by possibility have occurred. The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,—a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer space of time than three minutes and a quarter.” (1)
Back to the Best Books Page 13