Book #37 The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried

After the difficulty I had with Crow Country, the next book I picked up: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' could not have been more different. It's been lounging round my house unread for what must be about three years now and I finally took pity on it, call me a mental person but I feel sorry for books that aren't read and wonder if they feel sad. That's how alive books are to me, they aren't just words that someone made up, between two hard covers lie whole worlds, people we could never meet, places and times we can never experience for ourselves.

In 'The Things They Carried' O'Brien takes us to a period of history and an event that only men of a certain age and nationality will ever experience, the US invasion of Vietnam, and shares it. O'Brien is renowned in the States as the foremost contributor to Vietnam veteran literature, having prior to the publication of this book released a memoir of his experience as a young soldier 'If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home' and a Vietnam war based novel 'Going After Cacciato'.
'The Things They Carried' blurs the distinction between the memoir format and the novel format, apparently deliberately. "Tim O'Brien" is the narrator of the novel, he became a writer following leaving service and is 43, just like the author, but the "Tim O'Brien" of the novel is a fictionalised version of the self. In the novel O'Brien talks about the difference between "story truths and happening truths" and it is clear that O'Brien uses 'The Things They Carried' as a vehicle to tell stories that portray truths of the experience without necessarily being factually accurate. Some people would say that this is a short story collection but I think it hangs together as a novel made up of episodic tales.

The title The Things They Carried has a literal meaning in terms not only of their backpacks and weaponry, but their mementos from home. It also has the figurative meaning of what they carried with them from home when they came into the war in their minds, what experiences they carried with them in the duration of their service and what they psychologically carried on going home. It is tough to know if it's the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien who speaks but he described never really being one to tell stories to friends and family about the war but has never stopped writing about it. The writing has become his dialogue and his therapy it seems, and yet there is no overwhelming feel in the writing of a desperate or bitter man. Just of a man with a great ability to tell the stories of the era and the stories they told each other at night in their foxholes.

If my experience reading Crow Country was plodding and exasperating, reading The Things They Carried was the exact opposite. I would have read this book in one single sitting had it not got so late. It was phenomenal, truly. Gripping, beautifully constructed and written, with not only a sense of place and time but a great sense of the psyche. The psyche of what turns young men into soldiers and how they cope or are damaged by that psychologically. What it is like to be a soldier not just in terms of times of incident and battle, but the daily trudging grind of patrol alongside men who may perish or whom you may count on to ensure you don't. What it is like to be "in" a war.

There was a great section around page 81 and I feel I must quote it as an example of how great the writing is

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At it's core perhaps war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive, the grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living and you among them and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There's a kind of largeness to it a kind of godliness. Though it's odd you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly as if for the first time you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.    

I had a hard time picking out where to start and finish that quote as the writing around it is equally fine.
This book is an experience which awakes the senses and evokes the atmosphere. Without wanting to make a crass allusion to popular culture, you can smell the napalm. I think that this, though a shorter book, is the best piece of war fiction I've read since I read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; though this is of course, an earlier book. But what makes this a bit more special is that Tim O'Brien's voice is the voice of a man who actually went there and lived to tell the tale.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Read this book please.  10/10

Book #26 - Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

Lady Chatterley's Lover

A book more infamous than it is famous 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is one of those books that you feel 'you must get around to some day'. Published to great scandal in 1929 it remained banned in Britain for salacious content for 31 years and during that time became notorious though few had actually read it. Upon its release in 1960, people queued up at bookshops for it desperate to judge for themselves, it's publication became one of the first major literary events.

The book held a number of surprises for me, I expected to find that in the 82 year time lapse between the book being written and my reading it in the present day, what passed as 'racy' then, would be tame and timid now perhaps even cringeworthy and embarrassing. It is not so. The sex scenes in the book, and there are many are incredibly graphically written, not in a way that feels obscene, to me, anyway but in a way that feels right. They are frankly written, realistic and actually quite tasteful and romantic.   

The phrase 'ahead of his time' is of course a cliche now, but it genuinely applies in this case, were this book written by a modern author in 2011 about a romance between an aristocratic lady and her gamekeeper in 1929, it would probably be equally admired as a modern classic but cause very little in the way of moral outrage now with the potential exception of the Daily Mail.

As a modern reader of literature I find that it has had a real impact on my opinion of society of that time, it was an era perhaps when out of politeness things were left unsaid but not necessarily undone, and that the women and men of the 1920's are not perhaps as different from us as we tend to believe. The free use of the more frowned upon swearwords and modern slang in the dialogue indicates this too; like the paragraph in which Mellors admires Connie's derriere and actually uses the word arse. Obviously there are better examples but I think I'll keep them out of the blog, but it's not really what you "expect" from the "classic writers"

To sum up the plot Connie marries a man who is crippled in the War, he can no longer have children, and he encourages her to have an affair in order to concieve which she then embarks on with the gamekeeper Mellors. (My own frustration with this was the inaccuracy that a paralysed man cannot have sex/children which of course they can, but I sort of have to let that quibble go as this was not widely understood in 1929, and also it's a plot device)
This is where you realise there is more to this story, a man has given his wife licence to have affair, as a means to an end, what does this say about him and about her....?


I read Women In Love at university, and read it rather too quickly in order to have it read on time. I didn't particularly enjoy it or find it remarkable in any way. Last year I read Sons And Lovers which was a really bizarre experience because I really enjoyed the book, and I still think of it occasionally but I absolutely detested the main character and several of the supporting ones. Lady Chatterley's Lover was a different experience again and what I found myself thinking most was what a terrible shame it is that mere mention of the title is inextricably linked to the scandal surrounding it and the idea that it is smutty. There is so much more to Lady Chatterley than sex, although the sex IS well written.

During the course of the novel such diverse subjects are dealt with: the condition of Post World War I Britain, class struggle, class snobbery, intellectual snobbery, society, the roles of men and women, human nature, human frailty the emotional dynamics of a sexual relationship,  love, marriage and the disintegration of those things and even existentialism.

I find it such a shame that if you say 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' to someone, perhaps as recommendation they will automatically assume because of its infamy that you like "dirty books" or something. It's the main association everyone has with it, that it was banned because it was dirty.

And it's not just that! It's so INTERESTING, engrossing, well written and thought provoking that all the sex is just an integral part of the story not the sum of its charms. This book is excellent. Read it. 10/10

Book #13 The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox

The Vintner's Luck
Unlucky Number 13. Or not.

I found this book in a strange shop in Akaroa, New Zealand which sold everything from gollywogs to fudge. I was keen to read a book by a Kiwi author and my sister suggested Elizabeth Knox. I had hoped to read a book set in New Zealand, but in fact The Vintner's Luck is set in the vineyards of 19th Century France.

I am really loathe to even mention this book in the same sentence as One Day, let alone compare the two as though they were equals but the basic premise is the same.
When he is 18, Sobran Jodeau gets drunk, and stumbles across an angel, from there Sobran and the angel Xas meet each year on one day, the 27th of June for many years.

When I initially attempted to read this book, carting it from motel to motel, I found it odd, and couldn't get into it. Though its chronological, the jump from June to June made it feel disjointed as though a natural progression was missing. However, I decided that in my iPad addiction I had left paperbacks I had bought unloved and unfinished and decided I should finish them before getting any more electronic books.

I'm glad I did, the initial oddness i felt faded the more I read it, and I came to feel passionately that this was a book of beauty, a gem with a lyrical, magical quality to it. It's uniqueness and originality in every respect seems to make it defy normal descriptions. The juxtaposition of the human and the divine, the elements that seem to be inspired by Paradise Lost. The warm believable love, the dark secrets and mysteries, the allusions to insanity and even to evil, make this book although couched in the reality of wine production seem like a fairytale for adults, and an extraordinary one that.

I tend to like anything that inspires theological or philosophical thought, and whilst I recognise this isn't for everyone, I still think there's so much more to The Vintner's Luck , something for everyone. I would tell anyone turned off by the idea that it is about an angel, and therefore possibly religious to think again, as by not reading it for that reason you would be losing out on what I felt was a rich even sensual experience.

Read this book. 10/10

Book #1 - Monsters Of Men by Patrick Ness

Monsters Of Men

Monsters Of Men in the final book in the Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness. It's virtually impossible to write about Monsters Of Men on its own without spoiling the entire trilogy for those who haven't read it, so instead I'm going to write about the trilogy as a whole. The first book, The Knife Of Never Letting Go was read by a friend of mine who came by it through work and enthused about how great it was, I eventually got round to reading it late last year as part of my holiday reading. The Chaos Walking Trilogy to my understanding, is marketed at teenage boys in the Young Adult section of libraries and book shops. I'm a 29 year old woman with an English degree specialising in the Classics, and I thought this trilogy was utterly fabulous to a degree that I have a writers jealousy at not having written it myself. In the first book 'The Knife Of Never Letting Go' we are introduced to Todd, the last boy left in his town, Prentisstown, all the other boys having past the age of 13, the age at which a boy becomes a man in his community, and finally his birthday is approaching.

Through the writing we learn that Todd and his community are settlers from our own planet earth, who have come to a new planet and colonised it. We learn that when they arrived, three things happened:

a) Some kind of virus wiped out the female population leaving only the men left alive

b) The effect of the virus on the men and the animals meant that all their thoughts could be heard, the sound of all their thoughts creates The Noise, a permanent collective buzz in their community.This affords no man privacy or secrets. Comically, The Sheep, mostly say 'Sheeep' and Todd's dog Manchee doesn't say much more than 'Todd' and 'I need a poo' but you understand the oppressive nature of having no private thought for all concerned.

c) Following their arrival the humans had a war with the indigenous population The Spackle which they successfully won.

And then, just as he approaches manhood, Todd comes across a surprise in the marshes...it's a girl...a human girl.   
   

And so, the trilogy begins. Although I can't say much about this book, Monsters Of Men, what I can say about the overall trilogy is that its fantastic and compelling, making you desperate to read the next book once you've read the first, an example of how dystopian fiction can be done for young people, I've never read anything like it in that age group. I found Monsters Of Men slightly disappointing for certain reasons and so can only give that book 7/10 but the entire trilogy is a 10/10 MUST READ.

If you have teenage children, get it for them and sneakily steal it, and if you don't just get it anyway!!!