William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Going After Cacciato, set in Vietnam, recounts the desertion of Cacciato, a “dumb as a dink” infantryman who decides to go AWOL and head for Paris. The other members of his patrol follow in hot pursuit across Burma, Iran, Turkey and Europe until Cacciato is finally cornered in a seedy hotel in Les Halles. The fantasy (the epigraph from Sassoon, “Soldiers are dreamers,” rather gives the game away), the whimsical jokes, the conscious presentation of absurdity, all point inescapably to the weighty influence of Catch-22. If there has ever been a book begging not to be imitated it is Joseph Heller’s seminal and unique condemnation of warfare. All imitators suffer in comparison and Going After Cacciato is no exception. O’Brien’s book is an expansion of one episode in Catch-22 where, at the end of the novel, Orr ditches his plane in the Mediterranean and paddles his rubber dinghy to Sweden. In Catch-22 Orr’s escape is the final inspiration for Yossarian: Orr, who everyone thought was quite mad, eventually triumphs. Going After Cacciato is a Vietnamese reworking of this theme but Cacciato’s toiling journey cannot sustain interest; the initially amusing notion just can’t be stretched out into a novel. The best sections of the book are the descriptions of operations in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam where the author fought himself, but which he portrayed far more efficiently in his autobiographical account If I Should Die in a Combat Zone.

It is the Vietnam war — the most scrutinized and observed conflict ever — that has forced us to re-examine most serious war fiction and which exposes its inadequacies. All the newspaper accounts and newsreel pictures — of heavily armed men firing endlessly at jungle, napalm blooming in straw villages, the almost complete absence of enemy dead and wounded — spoke of experiences wholly unlike those encountered in novels. As the vast majority of us are non-combatants we are wholly dependent on the accounts of others when it comes to learning about war. It is an aspect of experience — unlike, say, childhood, love, loneliness — where verifiability is hard to come by. Vietnam, more than anywhere, showed the almost divine illogicality of warfare, when a peasant army defeated the most powerful nation in the world. Beside it Catch-22 reads like a model of propriety and good sense — reality confounding art once again. The reaction to this has yet to be felt. Very few accounts of the war have yet appeared and most of these are documentary. There has been no true Vietnam war novel up to now; those that have been published — such as Going After Cacciato, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers or even Dinah Brooke’s Games of Love and Death — are really written around the subject. One reason for this is that Vietnam, having exposed the redundancy of war fiction, has literally left writers wordless. The same fictional silence surrounds the Biafran war — one of the most tragic, haphazard and amateur conflicts of all time — which is all the more surprising considering Nigeria’s lively and impressive literary talents. It seems that there just do not exist the modes and structures within the genre of war fiction to come to terms with experiences utterly different from those we have been led over many years to expect.

However, there are signs of change. The first indications of this shift of opinion, the beginnings of a reassessment, do not lie in fiction or the cinema (unless Francis Ford Coppola’s much heralded Apocalypse Now proves me wrong) but, strangely enough, in military history. Three books have appeared in the last few years that mark an entirely new if not revolutionary approach to their subject and which can be simply classified as looking at the realities of war from the ground up. They are Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme, Len Deighton’s Fighter and John Keegan’s exceptional study The Face of Battle.

One reading of The Face of Battle will show how wide of the mark most war novelists are and should convince anyone of the falseness of the so-called realities of warfare that have hitherto been accepted as accurate. Len Deighton’s Fighter is the best means of getting behind the thick cloud of myths surrounding the Battle of Britain. This is not to say that effective novels of war have not been written. Examples of convincing accounts of war — in line with the conclusions of the three books mentioned above — can be found in, for example, the Caporetto chapter in A Farewell to Arms, Catch-22, and Christopher Wood’s fine novel about Cyprus and EOKA, Terrible Hard, Says Alice, but they form a small minority and on the evidence of these three new novels it seems they are more than likely to remain in that state.

1979

Towards the end of William Golding’s novel — Rites of Passage — its protagonist Edmund Talbot remarks to a naval lieutenant that “life is a formless business, Summers. Literature is much amiss in forcing a form on it!” The notion is a central one in Golding’s work and also in any appreciation of it, for literature, we are now fully aware, cannot do other than impose a form, even when aping life at its most random and contingent. From one point of view Dean Jocelin’s vision and construction of his cathedral spire is a prolonged debate on the futility of the entire purpose of trying to shape and create something out of redoubtably intractable material — the writer’s problem no less than the medieval architect’s. Golding goes further than this. Not content with the struggle to shape and form he also seeks answers to grave and essential questions about the human condition: “the unnamable, unfathomable and invisible darkness that sits at the centre” (Free Fall). This overall seriousness of intent on Golding’s part — the sense that his novels are meditations on or dramatizations of life’s most seminal concerns — is at once his great strength and his weakness, an advantage and a constraint; some of his novels are immeasurably enhanced by it, others find the freight of significance too much to bear.

Perhaps the problem can be conveyed more precisely by recording a remark Graham Greene made. Greene complains that “I would like to ascend into myth but find my books so often muddy with plot.” This, I suspect, is not only a piece of self-criticism (misguided, in my opinion) but also a wishful indication of the way Greene would like his books to be read. It’s a plea for less popular assessment, a desire to be rated — or to write — on a deeper more elemental level. Golding, on the other hand, suffers from the opposite reaction. Not only in the reverential, solemn way people approach his work but also, from his fourth novel onwards, in some impulse governing the way he writes.

Most novels tend inevitably towards what we can call the world of history — the rich infinitely varied world of phenomena, of appearances and details. Indeed, it can be argued that there is something in the novel form itself that fosters and encourages this inclination. This is what Greene is bemoaning — the pull is too hard for him to resist. Golding, alternatively, has determinedly steered his fiction towards the other pole: that of myth, and all the more single-mindedly since Free Fall. Of course, in most serious fiction both elements coexist, but in varying degrees and, by and large, the mythic features are subordinate, the referential aspects of the form claiming most of our attention. This duality also applies to Golding. Lord of the Flies, he has related, started out primarily as an attempt to portray what children are really like, in opposition to the anodyne Victorian image in Coral Island. However, the novel is more than that, clearly — or at least became more than that — developing into the first exploration of now familiar Golding themes: an examination of innocence, the dark truth about human nature and a delineation of his particular Manichean vision of the world.