SINCE WE’RE AT WAR, HOW ABOUT A LIST OF GREAT WAR NOVELS!

War is Ugly. War is Dangerous. War is Sometimes Inevitable. And it Just Gets More Deadly Every Year.

There’s some sarcasm, a little facetiousness and more than a bit of disgust at the conflicts happening around the world and how we, the United States of America, is acting and participating in those conflicts, in the title of this blog post. For good or bad, great fiction often comes from these conflicts. I love war novels (and some short fiction about war), but I despise war. War is started by men in power. It is started because one country believes another country (and when I say “country” I mean the men in power, not the people of that country) believe they are entitled to something, be it land, resources, because of heightened egos and to increase global and regional power, breakdowns in diplomacy or actual breakdowns in governments, ideological differences regarding free speech and the arbiters of truth, ethnic and religious differences, historical grievances, and so on. This is not a good time around the world. I hope things change. But we’re seeing novelists and writers producing fiction that’s chronicling the ills of countries at war and, perhaps, leading up to WWIII. This may be a bit of a stretch; but it may not be. Only time will tell.

Since reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 back when I was in my early twenties, I’ve sort of been hooked on war fiction. I’ve read nonfiction and fiction about war whenever new books come out, but have also dived into plenty of older works as well. I’ve written short stories about wars and a couple of novels (unpublished) that required thousands of hours of research and editing (I’m still editing them). I’ve met with WWII B-24 Liberator Bomber Pilots to get firsthand accounts of what it felt like to be in their roles during the war, and spoken to the late John Hume, an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland to discuss the decommissioning of weapons by the IRA, and James (Jim) Lyons, Clinton’s Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Economic Initiatives in Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of the Republic while I wrote a novel about the IRA and ETA, the Basque Country Separatists in the north of Spain, which I discussed in a previous post.

Today, “in honor” of “the President’s” joining into the Israel/Iran conflict by ordering air strikes/bombing attacks on Iran with Benjamin Netanyahu (who I’m no fan of and who’s served more time than he should be allowed to as Israel’s Prime Minister [my take is you can serve 2 terms, not 3 or more like all authoritarians like Trump would like to serve]) I’ll be providing a list of war novels and fiction I believe are worth reading. If I leave any “major” ones out, it’s not because I’m criticizing them, but rather because I have either not read it/them or because I think they’re over-hyped or just not good. There are plenty, including award winners and some that have been made into movies, which were better than the books (which, as we know, doesn’t happen all that often). So, here they are, in no order in particular: make of them what you will. But I enjoyed them:

1.     MATTERHORN: It took Karl Marlantes thirty years to write Matterhorn. I loved the novel. It’s one of those immersive Vietnam novels that not only reveal the monotonous aspect of time spent in shitty, muddy jungles with people from all sorts of places in the U.S. both upper class and from blue collar communities but touches upon race and young mens’ journeys from boys to men. It’s well-written and you instantly become immersed in Marine Lieutenant Waino Mellas’s story. The book sticks out atop other warm books, and its popularity is merited.

A Great Novel about the Vietnam War Written by Karl Marlantes Over Thirty Years.

2.     FOR WHOM The BELL TOLLS. Hemingway is king when it comes to war novels and fiction. He’s one of my top five favorite writers, and having lived in Spain and understanding the culture he was living in and the people he loved, I feel a certain camaraderie/insight with him and the fiction he produced. Hemingway’s hero Robert Jordan is in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. He’s attached to a NaRepublican guerilla unit (the Republicans were the faction loyal to the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic, and thus against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, i.e., the bad guys). Jordan falls in love with Maria, a young Spanish woman, which acts as contrast to the fighting Jordan participates in as he fights alongside the Brigades. Here’s the first line of the novel: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” For me, it’s one of the best novels ever written, not just about war but period.

Ernest Hemingway's Novel of the Spanish Civil War is One of the Best War Novels Ever Written.

3.     A FAREWELL To ARMS: Yep. Another Hemingway novel, but it’s merited, in my opinion. The novel tells the story of Frederic Henry, a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army during WWI. Hemingway has been famously quoted as having rewritten the ending to the novel thirty-nine times. The novel was first published in 1929. Henry falls in love with an English nurse named Catherine Barkley, whose fiancé was killed in battle, and drama ensues. There’s much more to the novel, and Hemingway’s writing and reputation stand for themselves. Read the book if you haven’t—you won’t regret it. Although, to be fair, Heminway isn’t for everyone.

Hemingway's Novel was Called "The Best American Novel to Emerge From WWI."

4.     THE THIN RED LINE: James Jones is a giant of war fiction. Besides The Thin Red Line, he’s the author of From Here to Eternity, Some Came Running, a collection of short stories called The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, and a couple non-fiction books. The Thin Red Line was also made into a movie starring pretty much everyone in Hollywood, including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jim Caviezel, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, George Clooney, John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, and ten million other actors. I enjoyed the novel more than From Here to Eternity, which seems to be more popular than Red Line for some reason (but I enjoyed both). Red Line is a novel about WWII, and takes place on an island in the Pacific, which is a theater of war much less explored than that of the European theater of war in both books and film. The book is about Charlie Company’s experience during the Battle of Guadalcanal and the toll war takes on the soldiers who fight in the war.

Great Book. Great Movie. James Jones's Novel is a Classic to be Read More Than Once.

5.     ALL The LIGHT We CANNOT SEE. Anthony Doerr’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Goodreads Choice Awards Best Historical Fiction, and the Audie Award for Fiction. I enjoyed the novel, but not sure if it should have won the Pulitzer. I’m not knocking Doerr’s novel—it’s well researched and a good, quick read. But my Pulitzer standards are perhaps a little more literary than what I think Light provides readers. The novel takes place during WWII and is about a blind French girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc. She hides out in her great uncle’s house in Saint-Malo. The Nazis have invaded Paris, and Werner Pfennig, a German boy with radio technology skills, discovers Marie’s radio transmissions.

Anthony Doerr's Novel Won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

6.     THE TIN DRUM: Günter Grass’s novel, published in 1959, tells the story of Oskar Matzerath, who uses a tin drum to “comment on the absurdities and horrors of Nazi Germany and its aftermath.” Oskar, who is also the narrator of the novel, decides not to grow up. He can shatter glass with his voice. The tin drum is a symbol of Oskar’s way of communicating his dissent for what’s happening. There’s a little magical realism in the novel, and the novel is a dark one. In the novel, Oskar joins a troupe of performing dwarfs, models in the nude, forms a band with a couple other characters, becomes famous, and ends up in an insane asylum. The book has stood the test of time for a reason, and I highly recommend it.

The Book Cover Image of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum Says Everything You Need to Know About the Novel.

I’ll stop there, or we’ll be here, well, for eternity. As a writer, there’s something visceral about picking up and wrapping yourself up in the world of war fiction. You feel the mental anguish, the psychological battles, the physical pain that authors, many (perhaps most) of whom have experienced the trials and tribulations of the wars they write about. They tell us readers about the countless hours of sitting around doing nothing. Of the childish humor that entertains them so they can pass the long days they’re forced to endure. And then recall in all the gory detail the other times that aren’t so boring, when the ugliness of war impresses upon them the traumas that they will carry with them until the day they close their eyes never to be opened again. We just bombed Iran. We’re (this administration, anyway) are giving the finger to Ukraine, because our “president” wants to be a Putin. A Xi. An Erdogan. The only thing I’m looking forward to more than another guy in the White House are the books that are going to be published and that are being published that chronicle the times we’re living in in all its gory truth.

SINCE WE’RE AT WAR HOW ABOUT A LIST OF GREAT WAR NOVELS! is a little bit nonfiction and a little bit of a rant. Either way, war novels will be around forever, for we can't see, as a world, to not want to kill each other.

Cully Perlman is author of THE LOSSES, a novel. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com