The worst things in war are never done between soldiers.
In the west's war books genre there are books that seek to exhilarate us with tales of derring-do like The Guns of Navarone. There are military books that offer something like a glimpse in to the souls of the awkward warriors we have sent forth along side military detail and action like The Thin Red Line or The Naked and the Dead.
Finally there are the books that strive to turn us and our wars inside out, to search for clues as to what the hell happened; books like The Kindly Ones and Matterhorn. Books that want us to face what happened rather than pattern it away into a comfortable narrative and turn our backs.
In the last ten years I read two war books that sought to burst free of their genre: The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes) by Mark Littell and Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, both are superb. I cannot forget either of them.
The Kindly Ones or Les Bienveillantes is by American-born Jonathan Littell and was published in French in 2006. It won the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, two of France's finest literary prizes.
The Kindly Ones tells the story of Dr Max Aue “a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France”. Max Aue was a classically educated, intellectual Nazi who skipped merrily through the Holocaust and his own personal genocides without really getting much more than a stomach ache, ok he had a nervous breakdown and got shot in the head, but I digress.
In The Kindly Ones Max is looking back over his life; his involvements in the Holocaust and many of the other most important moments of the Second World War. Max presents the evidence through the eyes of a non-participant, the curious cog.
The author uses Greek morality plays to help us see how Max can deal with his guilt and remain a somewhat aloof banal creature, albeit one involved in the murder of millions. The book's reviews inform us that Max Aue went to Science Po (Paris) and the University of Berlin, before he went on to be a lawyer and a Nazi.
“I live, I do what can be done, it's the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!” Max Aue
The Kindly Ones sold well in France but in the United States and Germany it struggled to break through having been mercilessly pilloried by various media who thought it too cruel, and struggled to understand why somebody would write such a book. It does not serve us up a moral ending and for this it has not been forgiven. Indeed it suggests that there is no morality except manifestations on the physical and psychology of Max the Franco-German pseudo intellectual as his experiences make him sick and put him in harm's way.
Matterhorn was written by Karl Marlantes, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and published in 2009. Matterhorn tells the story of Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, his arrival and subsequent experiences with Bravo Company in Vietnam.
From the outset this book reads like something we are familiar with, a man's book on war, its inequality, randomness and its echoes magnifying the issues of the outside world.
Bravo Company is fighting the countryside, themselves, Army bureaucracy, and the invisible enemy. Matterhorn is the nickname for a hill they must fight for again and again. A hill which comes to represent the US's objectives in the war. Matterhorn is vital ground that is given up without a voice raised in anger, ground with suddenly no strategic value that only days before was being attacked as if it alone held the key to victory. Matterhorn is the US marine's whole point for being there. We learn along with Mellas, the young officer, that there is no point in them being there.
The book reads well and can be gorged on. Often war books such as this struggle to illuminate for us anything beyond the commonplace of war we have been conditioned to expect, but Matterhorn is different, it exposes the preponderance of fragging, the act of soldiers killing their officers.
There are fragging instances throughout the book and they give us an extra angle and a heightened sense of the triangulated terror everybody felt. Like a soldier you get to know just seconds before they have their head exploded, Matterhorn goes to some lengths to portray that for soldiers and officers alike it was a bewildering war, lived and fought in a constant 360 swivel as enemies suddenly emerged and melted away instantly, time after time.
Internal demons, propaganda demons and the hidden, far more terrain savvy, enemy demons all swirling around the confused angry young soldiers as they break and die. Society's racial tensions loom large in this long book; another element which is noteworthy, insightful and rings very true, and along with the fragging these are the standout sections of a fine book.
But for all that Matterhorn veers dangerously close to being a war thriller, something the author does not intend I think.
The Kindly Ones reads as a witness account of atrocities such as Babi Yar and the Lvov Pogroms and, as such, is the far more serious book, the more valuable book and deserves to be placed in the upper echelons of not only military fiction but fiction itself. What Littell captures and makes us understand is, much like the present day engineer working in the gas fields of Qatar or Papua New Guinea, that the Nazi's provided young men with an opportunity to get away from it all, to drink schnapps, slap rear ends and massacre millions. They were on tour. It was this as much as anything else that enabled the Reich to prosper and scorch life, albeit briefly.
Littell rams home time after time that Max Aue's intellectualism meant nothing, that he went on holiday, took day trips, fancied his sister, almost certainly had children with her, and kind of sort of was involved in the subjugation of countries and people, and ultimately their genocide.
His liking for classical music is a redundant indicator, a faux ami. The capacity of a mid-ranking SS officer to enjoy the classics or listen to classical music means no more in the grand scheme of the Holocaust than whether or not they were from Munich or Salzburg. This constant remarking in review and indeed in conversation of the civilisation of pre-war Germans is mind blowingly irrelevant seeing as it contains a proven hind-sighted falsehood. They were not civilised, after that everything is but the writers own insecurities writ large.
Matterhorn cannot escape from the Vietnam of the cinema and the movies. And while Marlantes tries to push it through the screen into the open fields of serious comment, it remains projected onto our imagination through the prism of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and others.
What Littell achieves and delivers to us is the stench of death, he invokes a revulsion in us, a violent nausea akin to that experienced by Max. We fear Max's consistently revolting actions as he gets flung around Europe quoting and musing, all the while right in the middle of the Nazi death experience.
Marlantes drags us happily up and down the hills of Vietnam, we enjoy Matterhorn, something that will never be said of The Kindly Ones, and that perhaps is the Vietnam book's greatest disservice.
The Kindly Ones is enjoyed by no one, nor should it ever be.
My name is Thomas Bartlett and Americans Bombing Paris is my first novel. Americans Bombing Paris (#ABP) is a contemporary romantic thriller, I tried to write a book unlike any I had read before. I am also a published ghost writer. I'm from Ireland; Belfast, Galway and Dublin. I've lived in Paris, Spain, the US and England, and now I am back home. I read anything and I am working on my third novel All Girl Army. I make it all up.
Please check out my blog: thomasbartlettbooks.com
Buy ABP on Amazon: Americans Bombing Paris
Twitter: @TomAlicante
Facebook: Americans Bombing Paris
If you are a writer and you want to be a contributor, email: admin@booksgosocial.com
If you are interested in book promotion, please visit http://thebookpromoter.com
