AUTHOR: SEBASTIAN BARRY
Pages: 292
Date: 25/06/2013
Grade: 4
Details: Book Club read for Dialogues
Through Literature
Library
The blurb:
“In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind
Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the
Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. Once there, he
encounters a horror of violence and gore he could not have imagined and
sustains his spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the
camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his side.
Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in Ireland in his
absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split and ravaged by forces
closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds with his family, he knows he must
rejoin his regiment and fight until the end.”
Wow, this was a difficult book to read. I’ve rarely read a book so
filled with heartbreak, violence, despair and darkness.
Willie Dunne is a wonderful character; an admirable young man living in Dublin with his father,
who is a superintendent with the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and his three
sisters. Disappointed not to be tall enough to join the police himself, Willie
finds joy in his job as a builder, his loving family, and Gretta, the girl he
wants to marry one day. When the First
World War breaks out Willie doesn’t hesitate for long and decides to sign up.
And that is where the nightmare starts. The optimists who liked to think
this would be a short war and an easy victory for England and its allies turned out to be very wrong. While Willie
might have feared that he wouldn’t be finished training soon enough to join the
fighting, it isn’t long before he finds himself wishing that those fears had come
true. Because Flanders in the years from 1914
until 1918 was a living nightmare and young Willie was there for almost all of
that time. And we, the readers, get to join Willie Dunne as his youthful
optimism is transformed through pessimism into despair.
And the war on the continent is not the only form of upheaval impacting
on Willie Dunne’s life. While he is fighting with the British Army in Belgium, the Nationalists rise in Dublin. With those
Nationalists seeing the Germans as their allies since the Brits are the enemy,
the big question becomes where does that leave Willie and the other Irish
volunteers. And since Willie is “a long long way” from home, trying to come to
terms with that dilemma is near impossible. By the time the end comes around
there is little to nothing left of the happy boy who joined the army. And the
one thing that could have made his heavy load a little lighter arrives too late
to bring him any comfort.
This is a powerful story of the horrors of war, of values slowly
disappearing, of loyalty – to yourself, to each other, to your country, your
faith, your ideals – and the loss thereof, of the nightmare that is a war
between young men, fighting for ideas they know very little about for all the
wrong reasons.
This book reads like a long listing of misery. In fact, even the writing
itself at times sounds like the author is compiling a list; sentence after
sentence starting with “and then”. It makes a point because four years of pure
nightmarish misery is of course exactly what the First World War was, what
every war is. It does make this a very difficult book to read though. By the
time I reached page 200 I had to start forcing myself to keep on turning the
pages.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course I don’t expect a book about war to bring
me a happy story. But I have read enough books about war and destruction to
recognize this one as particularly bleak. And perhaps that is the sort of story
the world should be reading. Because we still have young people going to join
conflicts in countries they don’t know anything about for reasons they don’t
understand to obey masters who have no idea about the hell they’re sending
their youngsters into. All of that still doesn’t mean that I enjoyed reading
this book. I’m glad I did, but I don’t think I’ll ever look at this book again.
Because some stories, no matter how well written, are just too heart-breaking
to read twice:
“Between your own
countrymen deriding you for being in the army, and the army deriding you for
your own slaughter a man didn’t know what to be thinking. A man’s mind could be
roaring out in pain of a sort. The fact that the war didn’t make a jot of sense
anymore hardly came into it.”
Or, in the words of the song The Green Fields of France:
But here in this graveyard it's still
no mans land
The countless white crosses stand mute
in the sand
To man's blind indifference to his
fellow man
To a whole generation that were
butchered and dammed
Well Will Mc Bride I can’t help wonder
why
Do those that lie here know why did
they die
And did they believe when they answered
the call
Did they really believe that this war
would end war
Well the sorrow the suffering the glory
the pain
The killing the dying was all done in
vain
For young Willy Mc Bride it all
happened again
And again,and again,and again,and again
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