“Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.”
- George MacDonald Fraser
As promised, I'm going to trudge forth today with a couple of reviews.
Fiscal irresponsibility seems to stay a consistent factor in my erratic city-life, and my recent discovery of Amazon.ca has not helped any. Now, when I say 'discovery', don't be confused, I haven't been unaware of Amazon all these years, I just never bothered to shop online very often. Long story short - no shipping costs for used paperbacks with purchases over $35.00 delivered right to my door? I have a bit of a problem when it comes to owning books - I can't step into a library, for instance, because I'll never return a single copy. I just want that book to live on my fucking shelf, dammit - I want the sum total of my collection to be stacked in more elaborate ways until I have an Arche de Triomphe of books on my shelves, until I've stacked them in pagodas and temples palisaded with other books of different genres and sizes. It's a bizarre quirk. It's hard to say whether I'm better off thanks to the Internet, or worst. In the days when I would wander Chapters and walk out with more books than I could afford, my literary appetites seemed much less efficient... then again, my credit cards are now maxed out and I need to buy more furniture. More bang for my buck still doesn't leave me with any more bucks...
Whatever.
Quartered Safe Out Here
by George Macdonald Fraser
The above quote is from the memoir in question, an account of the author's experiences during the Burmese campaign in World War II. I chose it not only because it was one of the few I could find without a hard-copy of the book in my hand, but because it unashamedly represents something so lacking in most war memoirs - unabashed honesty.
There are millions of books written about war, from a million perspectives, all of which are without second-guessing taken with a grain of salt (hopefully) by their legions of readers. But this is the only book written about a man's experience at war where he flagrantly takes into question his own reliability as narrator. Having served on combat operations in Afghanistan back in 2010, this hit home. I find myself remembering certain events differently than members of my own platoon (one must take into account those differing perspectives), or than journalistic accounts of them. Fraser is one of the few authors who has effectively sat down and stated "these events are true in the sense that I remember them happening this way" and shrugs as to their veracity in accordance with historical review. Reading these accounts, so comfortably honest, makes it easy to sit down behind that blank OpenOffice document and start typing. I kept slim notes, while I was deployed, but most of them I imagine my ex-girlfriend burned along with all the other correspondence I sent her during my rotation. So it goes.
Honesty is really what drives the story home here, and Fraser's knack for authentic dialogue that practically runs off the pages in rivulets. The narrative in itself is interspersed with personal reflections from the author himself, centering around political and humanitarian issues like the dropping of the Atomic bomb, British Colonialism in India, and the question of "emotional pornography" in the Modern Age. All of these are unapologetically shaped by the author's experiences and as a soldier I can sympathize and even agree in some places. The latter issue, for instance, hit home - I remember being aggressively questioned as to the state of my mental well-being after rotating home, to the point where it was offensive. And with forty-or-so other Camerons having just rotated home, I wasn't alone. The fact is, whatever issues came up from our individual experiences were soothed away by collective therapy. And when I say 'therapy', I mean the kind that takes place in the Junior-Ranks Mess after-hours and during the excursions to the Byward Market. The sad reality is we're fine, and most people can't seem to accept that because they consider their mediocre, sheltered lives to be normative in the grand scheme of things.They labels us (affected by war as we are) as deviants, when in reality we are just fine and probably better off less ignorant and self-entitled.
The central theme to the story is the dysfunctional camaraderies between the members of Nine-Section, who mostly speak in a Northumbrian accent so thick you could spread it on rye. There is that imperishable sense of brotherhood from living together in austere, depraved conditions, with others that has translated over from so many war narratives before and after I won't waste time dwelling on it here. But Fraser's prose is very visceral, and a quarter into the novel I could feel the humidity sucking against my clothes and the rain dripping off the tip of my nose, smell gun-oil and the cheesy waft of old boots. It concerns itself with the infanteer's experience, that is to say slogging through the muck from engagement-to-engagement (which are few and far between, as were mine, in varying degrees of intensity) and more interested in the little stories between road-movements (like the author's promotion and attempt at distilling a well, without success and with ensuing hilarity).
This is what it was like being a British soldier in Burma during the war, and this is what it is like being a soldier at war in general. I burned through this book like wildfire and have since passed it off Cameron-to-Cameron with positive reception all-round. If anybody who reads is reading this, pick it up, you'll be surprised.
- George MacDonald Fraser
As promised, I'm going to trudge forth today with a couple of reviews.
Fiscal irresponsibility seems to stay a consistent factor in my erratic city-life, and my recent discovery of Amazon.ca has not helped any. Now, when I say 'discovery', don't be confused, I haven't been unaware of Amazon all these years, I just never bothered to shop online very often. Long story short - no shipping costs for used paperbacks with purchases over $35.00 delivered right to my door? I have a bit of a problem when it comes to owning books - I can't step into a library, for instance, because I'll never return a single copy. I just want that book to live on my fucking shelf, dammit - I want the sum total of my collection to be stacked in more elaborate ways until I have an Arche de Triomphe of books on my shelves, until I've stacked them in pagodas and temples palisaded with other books of different genres and sizes. It's a bizarre quirk. It's hard to say whether I'm better off thanks to the Internet, or worst. In the days when I would wander Chapters and walk out with more books than I could afford, my literary appetites seemed much less efficient... then again, my credit cards are now maxed out and I need to buy more furniture. More bang for my buck still doesn't leave me with any more bucks...
Whatever.
Quartered Safe Out Here
by George Macdonald Fraser
The above quote is from the memoir in question, an account of the author's experiences during the Burmese campaign in World War II. I chose it not only because it was one of the few I could find without a hard-copy of the book in my hand, but because it unashamedly represents something so lacking in most war memoirs - unabashed honesty.
There are millions of books written about war, from a million perspectives, all of which are without second-guessing taken with a grain of salt (hopefully) by their legions of readers. But this is the only book written about a man's experience at war where he flagrantly takes into question his own reliability as narrator. Having served on combat operations in Afghanistan back in 2010, this hit home. I find myself remembering certain events differently than members of my own platoon (one must take into account those differing perspectives), or than journalistic accounts of them. Fraser is one of the few authors who has effectively sat down and stated "these events are true in the sense that I remember them happening this way" and shrugs as to their veracity in accordance with historical review. Reading these accounts, so comfortably honest, makes it easy to sit down behind that blank OpenOffice document and start typing. I kept slim notes, while I was deployed, but most of them I imagine my ex-girlfriend burned along with all the other correspondence I sent her during my rotation. So it goes.
Honesty is really what drives the story home here, and Fraser's knack for authentic dialogue that practically runs off the pages in rivulets. The narrative in itself is interspersed with personal reflections from the author himself, centering around political and humanitarian issues like the dropping of the Atomic bomb, British Colonialism in India, and the question of "emotional pornography" in the Modern Age. All of these are unapologetically shaped by the author's experiences and as a soldier I can sympathize and even agree in some places. The latter issue, for instance, hit home - I remember being aggressively questioned as to the state of my mental well-being after rotating home, to the point where it was offensive. And with forty-or-so other Camerons having just rotated home, I wasn't alone. The fact is, whatever issues came up from our individual experiences were soothed away by collective therapy. And when I say 'therapy', I mean the kind that takes place in the Junior-Ranks Mess after-hours and during the excursions to the Byward Market. The sad reality is we're fine, and most people can't seem to accept that because they consider their mediocre, sheltered lives to be normative in the grand scheme of things.They labels us (affected by war as we are) as deviants, when in reality we are just fine and probably better off less ignorant and self-entitled.
The central theme to the story is the dysfunctional camaraderies between the members of Nine-Section, who mostly speak in a Northumbrian accent so thick you could spread it on rye. There is that imperishable sense of brotherhood from living together in austere, depraved conditions, with others that has translated over from so many war narratives before and after I won't waste time dwelling on it here. But Fraser's prose is very visceral, and a quarter into the novel I could feel the humidity sucking against my clothes and the rain dripping off the tip of my nose, smell gun-oil and the cheesy waft of old boots. It concerns itself with the infanteer's experience, that is to say slogging through the muck from engagement-to-engagement (which are few and far between, as were mine, in varying degrees of intensity) and more interested in the little stories between road-movements (like the author's promotion and attempt at distilling a well, without success and with ensuing hilarity).
This is what it was like being a British soldier in Burma during the war, and this is what it is like being a soldier at war in general. I burned through this book like wildfire and have since passed it off Cameron-to-Cameron with positive reception all-round. If anybody who reads is reading this, pick it up, you'll be surprised.
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