Book Review: "Blue Angel" by Francine Prose

Blue Angel (2000)
Francine Prose (1947)

314 pages

A professor falling for a student in class --- practically a cliché for novels set on college campuses. It would hardly be surprising if real-life professors read such stories and imagine that many of their fellow colleagues engage in such behavior, while their own cautiousness or unattractiveness leaves them on the sidelines.

How refreshing then, author Francine Prose turning this literary trope on its head in Blue Angel. Set at the fictional Easton College, deep in the woods of northern Vermont, her novel follows the gradual but inevitable descent into infatuation of Professor Ted Swenson for a student in his creative writing class. Instead of falling for one of the more attractive women in his class, however, Swenson finds his thoughts and emotions roiled by a “a skinny, pale redhead with neon-orange and lime-green streaks in her hair and a delicate sharp-featured face pierced in a half-dozen places, [wearing] a black leather motorcycle jacket and an arsenal of chains, dog collars, and bracelets.”(8)  The attraction? He discovers her to be a quite talented writer.

As the novel opens, Professor Swenson leads a quiet and unassuming life, happily married, and a daughter who has just gone off to college; he has settled into a comfortable teaching position in an out-of-the-way liberal arts college after having successfully published two novels himself. Progress on his third novel eludes him, however, and his struggles to write mix insidiously with a growing dissatisfaction over the mostly lackluster students he has encountered over many semesters, and a developing, if not quite acknowledged, mid-life crisis. Into his brooding mood breaks Angela Argo, a student who has sat silently through the first weeks of his class, never joining into the discussions of the other student’s writing, until she one day asks to meet with him in his office hours, to discuss her work.

Swenson expects a dreary meeting in which he has to carefully lower the overheated expectations and false hopes of yet another under-talented student-writer. The eventual discussion in his office does not improve his opinion, and when he accepts Angela’s request to review the first chapter of a novel she has been working on, he secretly anticipates the worst. To his surprise, however, he discovers that not only can Angela write well, but that her piece captures his attention, making him eager to read further --- and to learn more about its enigmatic young writer. He suggests that she not bring her story into class to be reviewed and discussed by the students, and instead continue to do this in conferences in his office, but he almost immediately questions his own request; is he protecting her from the criticism of untalented peers, or enjoying the opportunity to spend more time with this blossoming young author?

Angela’s story deals with a high school student’s attraction to one of her teachers, which only heightens Swenson’s sensitivity to the situation developing between them. He has always been careful to remind his students to guard against the assumption that a fictional work is autobiographical, but he finds himself struggling with this advice as she increasingly opens up to him in their conferences on her work. His thoughts swirling also with the strictures of a broader college campaign to pro-actively protect itself in the face of a growing, nationwide awareness of on-campus harassment, and a confusing mid-life stew of doubts and regrets, Swenson becomes unsure of his own intentions.

Soon the line blurs between helping a gifted student writer, and an attraction for a talented co-ed, as he finds himself helping her beyond what he normally would do for a student, and hiding his activities --- though innocent enough on their face --- from his colleagues and even his wife. When Angela’s own behavior leavers her intentions unclear, his life devolves into a confused and swirling mess of contradictory rationalizations and self-loathing. He allows situations to occur that are increasingly questionable, but goes forward with in part to prove that what has happened so far has no deeper implications.

Prose has Swenson tell the story, which ordinarily might leave us with less faith in him as a narrator, since we only get his side of the story. But she balances this by including Swenson’s silent replies in many situations: we hear the answers or comments he desperately wants to give to his students or colleagues or even his wife, but doesn’t, holding himself back in the moment, as we most all of us do at times with the running commentary in our minds. She also has him actively questioning his own thoughts and decisions, as he tries to discern between true feelings and false justifications. This lays open more deeply for the reader Swenson’s concerns, frustrations, and confusions, and makes him a more sympathetic character. Not simply a thoughtless philanderer, we understand the human frailty and ten thousand tiny rationalizations that lead him down the path to his personal perdition. That Prose finally does in the end allow him some hope for a future beyond his failings speaks also to a welcome recognition in this novel of the complexity our human condition and its refusal to exist as black or white, in either the choices presented to us, or the outcomes of the choices we make.

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Agostino" by Alberto Moravia

Agostino (1942)
Alberto Moravia (1907-1990)
Translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore

111 pages

The transition into adolescence can bring feelings of confusion and uncertainty, the sudden awareness that one is no longer a child, but not yet an adult: the games played with other children only a short time before feel uninteresting, if not inane, while forays into the adult world leave one struggling to understand rules of behavior that seem complex and arcane. Toss in the suddenly raging hormones, and it’s a wonder anyone makes it through.

In Agostino, author Alberto Moravia tells the story of a thirteen year-old boy abruptly entering this period. The title character’s father has died sometime before the story opens, but his family is well-to-do and so living comfortably; he has no siblings, living alone with his mother. As the novel opens, Agostino and his mother are spending their summer holidays at the sea, where they have their own house near the beach. Extremely close and affectionate, he and his mother spend their days lounging together in the sun, and each morning the two of them take a paddle boat out onto the water, where far from shore they swim and enjoy having the sea to themselves. Agostino looks forward to these daily trips, in which he has his mother all to himself; since the death of his father, Agostino’s mother has turned away any potential suitors, giving Agostino her undivided attention.

This blissful time for Agostino comes to a jarring end in the middle of the summer, however, when his mother suddenly accepts the invitation of a handsome young man to join him for a paddle boat ride. Agostino’s childhood innocence comes crashing down around him as he not only loses the exclusive attention of his mother, but also awakens to the recognition of his mother as a beautiful, desirable woman. Complicating matters, this realization awakens his own sexuality and, more critically, transforms his childish feelings of affection for his mother into a more disquieting direction for him.

Attempting to escape the physical proximity to his mother and so have space to work out these unexpected developments in his feelings, he ends up involved with a group of local boys, mostly older than himself. The boys in the group come from poor, working class families, and their coarseness and roughhousing, precisely the opposite of the children he has known in his life up to this point, both repel and attract him. He finds it difficult, however, to completely assimilate himself into their world of often brutish and thievish behavior. In his desire to achieve manhood, without precisely knowing what that destination entails, he gains little traction from observing either his mother’s world, or that of the group of local boys with whom he hangs out, and gradually becomes unmoored from any point of stability.

The focus of this short but affecting novel remains on Agostino; Moravia only somewhat generically develops the other characters, whether Agostino’s mother, or the group of local boys. Even with Agostino, we learn little or nothing about his past, his interests or his life in general. For Agostino the unexpected break with his childhood occupies him completely, and so also Moravia in telling the story.

In his young, main character, though, Moravia creates someone with whom the reader can empathize. Agostino is not someone you want to take by the shoulders and give a good shake to wake from a whining, self-centered pout. Rather Moravia’s story highlights the quite real complications of adolescence, and the loss of innocence that growing up entails. Any sensitive soul who has questioned their place among humanity when confronting the ugly and inhumane behavior sometimes present in the world will identify with Agostino’s feelings, when, out on a boat ride with the boys where he is the butt of their nasty jokes and coarse behavior, he realizes that

[his] sense of oppression and silent pain was made more bitter and unbearable by the fresh wind on the sea and the magnificent blazing of the sunset over the violet waters. He found it utterly unjust that on such a sea, beneath such a sky, a boat like theirs should be so full of spite, cruelty and malicious corruption. [It] created between sea and sky a sad unbelievable vision. There were moments he hoped it would sink. He thought he would gladly die, so infected did he feel by their impurity and so ruined.(66) 

---

Other reviews / information:

This is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

---

Read quotes from this book

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone" by Eduardo Galeano

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2008)
Eduardo Galeano (1940)
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried

391 pages

History can often seem distant and disconnected from our everyday lives --- of little relevance to our understanding of ourselves. Even for recent events this can be the case: if they have not affected us directly, their impact seems to fade quickly from memory, leaving a muted remnant if lasting at all. Do we though really exist so separated from history, or do we perhaps disregard a bit too rashly the past that has led to our present?

In Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, writer Eduardo Galeano demonstrates that we have much to learn about ourselves in the history we ignore or may be ignorant of. Presenting short vignettes of histories that range widely across time and geographic location, he tells stories of events, people and peoples through which he invites us, compels us really, to discover more about ourselves. This compilation of some 600 stories, most less than a page long, recall a world history by turns wondrous and banal, melancholy and cruel. Reading them reminds us that people who lived in times and places far removed from us had hopes, dreams, struggles and disappointments not so different from those that color our own lives. At the same time, on the darker side, Galeano confronts us with a history teeming with examples of people exhibiting wanton cruelty, or at best a greedy, self-interested rationalization of the existence of such cruelty, leaving us to recoil in horror at what may lie buried in some corner of our own soul.

Galeano acknowledges in the ‘almost’ of his book’s subtitle that he cannot cover all the stories of mankind’s long past, but he nonetheless manages to embrace the broad sweep of our history. In one of the first stories in the book, Galeano makes clear in just a few short words the immense distance mankind has traveled since our earliest ancestors began to spread outward from the plains of Africa:

Maybe we refuse to acknowledge our common origins because racism causes amnesia, or because we find it unbelievable that in those days long past the entire world was our kingdom, an immense map without borders, and our legs were the only passport required.(2)

And, from those earliest beginnings, Galeano carries us through to our conflicted post-colonial present of borders often artificial and militarized, making the biting observation toward the end of the book that:

The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand.(353)

Along with stories that touch on more these more general themes of our past, Galeano focuses in many of the vignettes on the lives of particular historical figures; some are quite famous, such as Mao Zedong, Winston Churchill or Mark Twain, others much less so, such as an officer in the Argentinian army known as the Blond Angel, who tortured and disappeared several nuns and other women, or a Cuban teenager who attended one day of literacy class and was so inspired by the idea of reading that he went off to a remote mountain village to teach it to others, learning each lesson for himself in preparation for teaching it the next day to his students. In these biographies we come face-to-face with hopeful recollections of people who tried to change the world for the better as well as cautionary tales of the evil that others have committed.

Among these stories, Galeano creates beautiful, if haunting, moments, capturing in particular the strain of melancholy that runs through much of human history. To take just one example: in an anonymous story set in a quiet bedroom centuries ago a heart-wrenching scene plays out that we can just as readily imagine happening in myriad locations throughout our modern day world:

The Art of Drawing You

In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes a coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave. (51)

For all the moments of hope and achievement captured in these stories, Galeano’s overarching theme lies in the inhumanity --- whether willful brutality or a willful blindness to brutalities being committed --- that mankind has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate on the poor, the weak, the other, as well as on the earth itself, its land, its water and its animals. If my experience reading these histories is any guide, there will be stories here that will describe such a level of evil that your first instinct will be to assume it cannot be true; but, when you query your preferred search tool, and investigate for yourself, I expect you will be as dismayed at what you find as was I.
 

---

Other reviews / information: A review by Neil Gordon of this book appeared in the New York Times Book Review.

Galeano has written a set of three books in a similar style that recount the history of the Americas from before Columbus to the present day.  They are titled Memory of Fire, with the three volumes titled, <i>Genesis</i>, <i>Faces and Masks<i/> and <i>Century of the Wind</i>, respectively.  I have read the first, so far, and can highly recommend it. Read quotes from this book here.

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Madmen of Benghazi" by Gérard de Villiers

The Madmen of Benghazi (2011)
Gérard de Villiers (1929-2013)
Translated from the French by William Rodarmor
260 pages

In 2011, as the Libyan uprising against Muammar Gaddafi raged on, Western governments anticipated a rebel victory and began seeking potential leaders to form a new, replacement government. Even casual attention to news reports at the time made clear the widespread destruction and chaos in Libya as the fighting continued, with daily pictures and videos of rebel militiamen in pickup trucks mounted with machine guns racing along streets and highways as they fought the Libyan army and occasionally one another. Throughout this period, Western intelligence agencies and Special Forces units were understood to be monitoring and participating in the uprising itself, and helping guide the transition to new leadership in Libya.

French journalist and author Gérard de Villiers used these events in Libya as the source material for his spy-thriller The Madmen of Benghazi. Written and published in 2011, the novel follows de Villiers’ pattern of turning the research and contacts he developed as a journalist into stories that appear to be pulled directly from the latest headlines, as described in a bio of the author at the front of the book. The novel stars a freelance secret agent for the CIA named Malko Linge, a character around whom based a long series of spy novels, stretching back more than four decades.

As the story opens, the CIA hires Linge to covertly protect Ibrahim al-Senussi, a wealthy Libyan ex-pat living in London who Western governments have identified as someone likely to protect their interests if placed at the head of a new Libyan government. Al-Senussi, having lived his life in comfort far from the dictatorship in his home country, naively agrees to this plan, grossly underestimating the forces arrayed against him in Libya, where fundamentalist groups loath both his Western connections and his moderate view of Islam. The CIA asks Linge to woo al-Senussi’s girlfriend, a gorgeous British model, in order to keep tabs on al-Senussi’s plans and contacts. As al-Senussi travels first to Cairo, expecting to meet with Libyans sympathetic to his rule, and then inadvisably goes on to Benghazi and so into the middle of the Libyan civil war, Linge follows him, trying to stay a step ahead of a fundamentalist rebel leader who wants al-Senussi, and eventually Linge himself, dead.

De Villiers' writing is fast-paced and focused on the action, with none of the characters very fully developed. Much of the action centers on the tense cat-and-mouse game between Linge and those who want both him and al-Senussi out of the way, but a faithful screenplay of The Madmen of Benghazi would struggle to get only an R rating, and not because of the violence: de Villier paints al-Senussi’s British girlfriend as someone men can’t keep their eyes off of, and who herself seldom keeps her clothes on when either el-Senussi or Linge can get her alone, in scenes that leave little to the imagination. Starting from the first paragraph, not many pages go by without things heating up again.

If you prefer your secret agents to have a more ascetic, or at least romantic, bent, you best look elsewhere. For a fast-paced, sexy thriller set in the events that fill the daily news, however, de Villiers’ The Madmen of Benghazi delivers.

---

Other reviews / information:

I've read one other of de Villiers' novels that's been translated into English: <u>Revenge of the Kremlin</u>, my review here.
 

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Alex" by Pierre Lemaitre

Alex (2011)
Pierre Lemaitre (1951)

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

376 pages


The set-up and plot seem clear enough.

Barely a half-dozen pages into Pierre Lemaitre’s crime novel Alex, the title character finds herself kidnapped off the street as she walks home from a restaurant. Brutally beaten, bound and gagged, she lies dazed in the back of a van as it speeds off into the night. As she passes out, her only thought is that she wants to live.

A page or two later we meet the detective assigned to her case, Camille. He has only recently rejoined the Brigade criminelle in Paris, after having taken time off to recover from the shocking death of his wife, who had been kidnapped and murdered. As he races against time to track down the missing victim, he cannot avoid mixing his thoughts and speculations on this new case with the painful memories of his wife.

For a reader of crime novels, the case seems clear enough: who has kidnapped Alex, where is she, and how will the detective find her alive?

Pretty straightforward, right?

Not so much. Lemitre soon turns this conventional kidnapping plot on its head, as the detective discovers that the real questions boil down to why. Like a parent whose child asks “why’” in response to every answer, Camille finds that each time he thinks he has taken a step closer to solving the case, a deeper mystery presents itself. The victim, who Camille at first so conflates with the bitter and raw images of his own wife’s death that he struggles to separate the two women in his mind, begins to take on her own personality, her own existence. The facts he gradually uncovers of her life up to the point of the kidnapping force Camille to focus on her as an individual, distinct from his memories of his wife, however similar the two crimes may have at first appeared to be.

This novel is not for the faint of heart, as the spasms of violence are shocking and extreme. But for those who can stand the grisly bits, Lemaitre provides an artfully created and entertaining page-tuner that will hold your attention through to the end.

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Fear" by Gabriel Chevallier

Fear: A Novel of World War I (1930)  

Gabriel Chevallier (1895-1969)

305 pages

[Our enemies] are … the children of the same God [as we are]. And God, the father, presides over the fratricidal struggle of his own children, and the victories on both sides. He’s just as happy whichever army sings the Te Deum. And you, one of the just, you pray to him to ruin and annihilate other just men. How do you expect me to make sense of that? [116]

Jean Dartemont, a French soldier convalescing from shrapnel wounds suffered during a bloody and chaotic battle of the First World War, confronts a hospital chaplain with this question. The chaplain has come to ask the soldier to repent of his sins, but Dartemont, fresh from the horror of the front lines, can only focus on “the greatest sin, in the eyes of the Church and the eyes of man, [which] is to kill your brother [and] which the Church is ordering” him to do. (116) He finds himself unable to sway the priest’s views of the war as just and right however; and, as he talks to the hospital nurses, and later his family and friends, he encounters this same support for the war again and again. In this support he recognizes, and laments, the success that French political and cultural leaders have had in creating a patriotic fervor around the righteousness of the war, and an image of the fighting as the latest heroic adventure in a centuries-long history of French military successes. He and his fellow soldiers at the front, by contrast, have found that the slaughter and destruction they witness and participate in has quickly disabused them of these sorts of idealistic beliefs.


In the autobiographical novel Fear, author Gabriel Chevallier tells the story of his experiences as a soldier during World War I, both his time at the front lines and on leave back among the civilian population, through the character of Dartemont. The dichotomy between the image of the war among the general public in France and the reality of the war for the soldiers fighting it, plays a central role in the novel. More generally, the reader gets a first-hand account of the horrific destruction the front-line soldiers faced in the First World War.

The story opens with proclamations of war being displayed on walls throughout Dartemont’s hometown, unleashing a tidal wave of excitement and expectation. Dartemont finds himself put off by the aggressive frenzy of the public he witnesses in the sudden rush to go to war; he is convinced that the political leadership in France, as well as that in all the other countries involved in the conflict, have fed their populations lies and miss-conceptions in order to drum-up support for an unnecessary war. Despite Dartemont’s recognition of the propaganda that has created a false image and justification for the war, once conscripted into the army even he can’t help but succumb to the spirit of adventure that the public and his fellow soldiers view in the conflict. He buys into the idea that the war will not last long, and looks forward to what he calls his “baptism of fire.” (39)

Upon finally reaching the front, however, his excitement quickly turns sour, as he experiences first-hand the unimaginable devastation of the war. Looking out across the no-man’s-land beyond the front-line trench he stands in, he discovers

[a] new and greater horror: the plain was blue. The plain was covered with our comrades [in their blue uniforms], cut down by machine guns, their faces in the mud, arses in the air, indecent, grotesque like puppets, but pitiable like men….(62)

 Each day he watches as the body count rises rapidly with each ineffective and seemingly senseless attempt to attack the German trenches, successive waves of French soldiers mowed down by the German machine guns.

In place of the feeling of adventure Dartemont had brought onto the war, a new, almost paralyzing sensation grows: Fear. He finds himself struggling with and analyzing this fear, trying to understand how he --- how any soldier --- can go forward into the almost certain death of heavy shelling and machine guns that awaits them when they climb forward out of the trenches to attack. Then, when an injury sends him first to a hospital far from the front, and later on a period of leave before he returns to the front, Dartemont discovers to his dismay and frustration that talking about this fear, about the dominant emotion he has felt during the war, is impossible. The people back home, well-steeped in propaganda that has filled them with a blind patriotism and an unrealistically impression of the war as a heroic adventure, view Dartemont’s descriptions of the reality of the fighting and the emotions it triggers for the soldiers as simple cowardice on his part.

Dartemont’s disgust is not limited to the civilian public however. He struggles also to understand how he and his fellow soldiers --- on both sides of the front --- don’t turn on their superiors, despite the horror of the battles and the apparently senseless decisions of their commanders to continue to stage attacks, when each attack by either side simply re-validates the obvious: the advantage in the war is with those who defend. Chevallier, as expressed through Dartemont, clearly comes away from his experiences in the war with a dark and deeply cynical vision of mankind:

Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible. They die the victims of their own stupid docility.

When you have seen war as I have just seen it, you ask yourself: ‘How can we put up with such a thing? What frontier traced on a map, what national honour could possible justify it? How can what is nothing but banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?’(7)

Fear presents a powerful statement against the insanity of war. Chevallier has written a novel that gives us an up-close and intimate look at the fighting along the front lines during World War I, and its effects on the soldiers caught up in the maelstrom. The story also takes us back home with the soldiers, where they discover that even their eyewitness accounts fail to sway the public’s deeply engrained belief in the fundamental righteousness and inevitable victory that their government has promised in its propaganda. Not surprisingly, Chevallier recalls in a preface to the 1953 edition of the book that “its author was sometimes taken to task” for what he wrote, though he adds that “those who fought as infantrymen … wrote [to him]: ‘True! This is what we experienced but could not express.’” (xiv) In a sense these reactions together represent a further manifestation of the idea expressed in the book that the general public have a false understanding of the reality of war experienced by soldiers at the front.

In that preface Chevallier also points out that the tone of the novel now strikes him as containing the “arrogance of youth,” that his Dartemont is “still naïve enough to believe that everything is susceptible to reason.” (xiv) Certainly the story gives no quarter in its condemnation of people’s shallowness and muddle-headedness, as the ‘Men are stupid and ignorant…’ quote above makes clear. From the vantage point of a century later, one can question the certainty with which Dartemont broadly condemns any nation for going to war; should a country not go to war to stop a Hitler, for example? But remembering the context in which the book was written, the saber-rattling and bravado that allowed the European continent to move seemingly inexorably into the Great War (a process described wonderfully in Ken Follett’s historical novel of the First World War, Fall of Giants, which I reviewed in the previous post), and the willingness of political and military leaders on both sides to allow the fighting to slide into a grotesque war of attrition, the tone seems well-matched to what Chevallier apparently experienced.

For me this story provides a compelling sequel to Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, written just a couple of decades earlier, though I have no knowledge of whether Chevallier was aware of the book. In Twain’s story (more fully reviewed in this earlier post), a public has been whipped into a frenzy to fight and defeat their enemy. After a minister gives a fiery sermon to his congregation, proclaiming the righteousness of the war and praying for God’s aid in vanquishing the enemy, an old man enters the church and walks slowly up to the pulpit. He commands the people to listen to “the unspoken part of the prayer” that God also heard: the destruction, the death, the horror that they have asked of him. In Fear, Chevallier takes us forward into the actual execution of the war, and so into the truth of all that the old man described.

---

Other reviews / information:
*This novel is yet another wonderful selection from the NYRB Classics collection.

*As I was reading this book, I stumbled across an article in National Geographic magazine, The Hidden World of the Great War, that describes the underground life of soldiers in the trenches, and recalls some of the challenges they faced beyond the fighting itself, as Chevallier describes in his autobiographical novel.

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Fall of Giants" by Ken Follett

Fall of Giants (2010)  

Ken Follett (1949)

922 pages

Well-written texts on history can teach us about the events that occurred during a particular period, and be effective in making clear the motivations of a country’s leaders and even the range of public opinion during that time. History books generally struggle, however, to help us understand the complexity of conflicting emotions and desires of those people caught up in a historical moment, or to engage our sympathy and empathy for them, even those with whom we may not be naturally aligned politically or culturally.

For this level of engagement a reader turns to historical fiction, which when done well fills this void left by the history books. The best such works introduce us to people who trigger our imaginations and pull us into their lives, whether as fictional characters representative of the mood and opinions of the time, or imagined versions of real historical figures. Through them we achieve insights into the personal and interpersonal struggles of that moment in history, and the connection of these struggles to the larger events of the time; rather than just read about history, we enter into it at the intimate level of those directly experiencing it.

By these measures, Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants succeeds brilliantly, illuminating for the reader the complexity of the issues surrounding World War I and their impact at a personal level, in a way a history text could not do as effectively. His novel opens in a Europe of the early 19th century whose highly structured and carefully divided societies will soon be forever changed by the extent and brutality of the first world war; the story then moves to the dehumanizing and disastrous evolution of the war itself, before concluding with the vengeful peace that would set the stage for a new, and even more destructive and bloody world war only a generation later. Using the advantages of historical fiction, Follett brings home to the reader the effects and cultural impact of the war at a personal level on people at different levels of European society, including the frustration of many at the political steps and miss-steps that seemingly made war inevitable, and the conflicts that arose out of the disparate opinions about the war.

Follett makes this history palpable to us through the interconnected lives of a half-dozen families spread across four countries that played a central role in the run-up to and the fighting of the war. Beginning in a small, invented town in his Welsh homeland, Follett introduces us to a fabulously rich earl and his country estate, as well as to a family of miners who work the coal mines on the earl’s land and live in houses leased out by the mining company. The earl, ultra-conservative and married to a Russian princess, uses his wealth and status to influence the government as a member of the House of Lords, where he attempts to argue for the active defense of the honor of the empire and hold back what he views with dismay as the rising tide of anti-establishment and democratic fervor in both Great Britain and the world at large; in these areas he struggles even with his own sister, a passionate campaigner for women’s suffrage, worker’s rights and a peaceful resolution to the struggles between Europe’s political leaders. Toward the far opposite end of the cultural spectrum, the growing outspokenness of exploited workers finds voice through the father of the mining family, who leads the local union, and educates his son, who has followed his father into the mines, and daughter, who works as a servant for the earl, equally forcefully in the fundamentals of Christian religion as well as the need for workers to stand up and face down those who oppress them. In the months before the war --- and later as the fighting rages --- the live of these two families become inextricably linked.

A German military attaché, who has close ties to the earl and his family, works for the German consulate in London and watches in horror as the politicians in countries across Europe at best ignore and at worst encourage the growing signs of conflict. He argues even with his father, a German diplomat and part of the conservative German hierarchy who see war as both inevitable and better fought now when Germany’s opponents are relatively weak and unprepared. He struggles with the conflicting feelings he has of his love for his homeland, his ardent disagreements with its hawkish leaders, and a love affair that could threaten both his, and his family’s, status.

Two brothers in Russia, orphaned by the father of the British earl’s Russian wife, have ended up working in a factory in St. Petersburg. The older brother conscientious and caring, the younger a lady’s man and gambler, both have dreams of going to America, in order to escape the oppressive regime of the czar and be able to live and work in freedom. One finally does manage to leave Russia before the war begins, but both find that the events of the war overtake them, one in the rising tide of Bolshevism which culminates in the Russian Revolution, the other in the aftermath of mistakes that force him to volunteer for service in the American army.

Finally, in the United States, the son of a wealthy family from Buffalo works as an adviser to President Wilson, traveling before and during the war to Great Britain, Russia and Germany to help the administration understand the situation and eventually try and broker a peace. His dealings lead him into repeated contact with the British earl and his family, as well as the German military attaché, and even, in an odd twist of coincidence, to the Russian brothers.

Other families play smaller roles in the story, though linked closely to these main characters. As hinted at above, the coincidences can seem to run thick in the novel at times, as the critical roles the main characters play --- just under the radar of history --- lead them to regularly cross-paths with one another, often with a significant level of engagement. This can leave one at times with the feeling that the novel is on the verge of devolving into a simple soap-opera (it’s easy to see the future TV mini-series in this story). Follett’s approach, however, allows him to create a rich range of characters from various levels of society in countries at the heart of the political and military action in World War I, and so explore a variety of the key social and political movements impacted by the war, while still telling a cohesive and engaging story.

In the spirit of the best in historical fiction, a reader comes away from the novel with not only a better understanding of the dynamics that led to the outbreak of the war, but also the roiling social upheaval present in Europe during those years that lay just barely concealed below what was sometimes only a thin veneer of patriotism and national unity created by the war.

---

Additional Notes:
* The Prologue, entitled Initiation, could stand alone as a wonderful short story.  Follett movingly portrays the passage into of manhood for a miner's son in a small Welsh town, as he prepares for, and then experiences, his first day down in the coal mine shafts.

*Shortly after finishing the book, I stumbled across an article in National Geographic magazine, The Hidden World of the Great War, that describes the underground life of soldiers in the trenches, and recalls some of the challenges they faced beyond the fighting itself, as Follett does in his story.

*Fear, by Gabriel Chevallier, is an autobiographical novel that gives a first-hand view of the life of a soldier during World War I, and the horror and destruction of the war.

---

Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf