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A Fictional War

Chris Flynn October 24

The first few pages of The Yellow Birds, the powerful debut novel by Kevin Powers, contain plaudits from other writers, comparing this Iraq war story to works by Hemingway, Norman Mailer and Tim O’Brien. Robert Olen Butler makes one of the strongest cases in his puff—'We haven’t just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our 21st Century Vietnam; we have also been waiting for something more important, a work of art that illuminates our flawed and complex and striving humanity behind all such wars.‘ A slightly odd inclusion to these raves comes from actor Damian Lewis, who recently won an Emmy for his portrayal of a troubled, possibly traitorous Iraq war veteran in Homeland and who many will remember as the lead in Band of Brothers. Lewis believes Powers has, “conjured a poetic and devastating account of war’s effect on the individual.”

Lewis has of course never been to war, but has played men who have and presumably conducted extensive research on the subject. Such confirmations of the novel’s merits, whilst undoubtedly welcomed by the author, might seem a tad unnecessary. Powers served as a machine gunner in the US Army in Iraq for two years. As to how much of the novel is fiction and how much is based on fact, we may never know. The story seems completely real and terrifying, packed with the sort of details only a soldier on the ground might notice. The only one of the numerous puff quotes worth a damn is probably that given by Anthony Swofford, who served as a Marine in the first Gulf War and subsequently wrote the excellent Jarhead.

Powers' novel thus falls into the slim category of high-end first class war fiction that may not be fiction at all, penned as it is by a former soldier. There may not be many superbly written novels in this genre but those that do exist are well worth seeking out for their harrowing front-line perspectives and distinct separation from more common action-oriented stories or straight-up combat memoirs. Swofford’s book is a good point of call, as are Vietnam-era novels If I Die in a Combat Zone, The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, all by Tim O’Brien. Tobias Wolff’s novelistic memoir In Pharaoh’s Army is also a very worthy read.

The field opens up enormously once you begin to delve into the Second and First World Wars, but one title has recently come to my attention by way of the Text Classics series. Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune was originally published anonymously in 1929 under his military serial number, Private 19022. Manning was an Australian soldier who fought in the trenches and wrote this memorable, brutal account of that time much later after the fact. The language in it is choice – the narrative is peppered with so many profanities it makes Deadwood seem tame and a vernacular is employed throughout that is fascinating to witness. Manning spent most of his life in England and gives his characters regional accents written in slang, reminiscent of top drawer Irvine Welsh. The swearing was stripped out of the novel for its 1930 re-issue as Her Privates We (a Shakespearian vagina reference—‘On fortune’s cap we are not the very button…Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?…’Faith, her privates we.’) and the identity of the author was still not widely known when he died in 1935. The book was a hit though, championed by Hemingway, Pound and Lawrence of Arabia. Manning’s identity was revealed in 1946 and the swearing was restored to the manuscript in 1977.

The Middle Parts of Fortune is an excellent precursor to modern war fiction written by men who fought like Kevin Powers. It also provides a detailed background for readers interested in exploring what the protagonists of many Australian war novels might have experienced prior to returning home, chief amongst them Chris Womersley’s superb Bereft.


 

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