The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 11 July 2014
by Tim O'Brien
Can you use a pure act of imagination to escape from something as dire and brutal as war? One can't be faulted for at least trying. Maybe, instead, one could just walk away from a war, the terror, the fear, the tragedy. And, so, in the opening pages of this enthralling novel, we watch as Cacciato, a young soldier in Vietnam, marches away from his brigade, walking off to the west, into the mountains and off to Paris, eight thousand miles away. It is war. This is desertion. The remaining members of the squad set off to catch Cacciato, to return him to the battlefield. The march grows increasingly surreal as the soldiers head off across the Laotian border, all the way to India, Iran, Greece and points beyond. The book proceeds back and forth in time and space, so that we do visit the gritty reality of Vietnamese rice paddies, beaches, mountains and corpse-littered battlefields. The soldier who routinely takes up the rear, Paul Berlin is an observer. His father tells him to look for the details, to return with war stories. Berlin experiences the extremities of war, and on one long night watch, imagines the journey after Cacciato, and the hopes for peace in Paris (where the Vietnamese peace talks are perptually stalled).
This story is multi-layered. It comments on the nature of imagination and the creative process. It comments, of course, on the experience of young soldiers in Vietnam. Many stories and movies have depicted the evasive goals of that war, its moral ambiguity, the extremes to which its survivors would go to get through it alive. This novel gives us a gripping on-the-ground view of the war, the soldiers' reluctance to plunge into the dangerous darkness of Viet Cong tunnels, the sudden brutality of death on the battlefield, the long numbing marches and nights slept in ditches. Its dream of peace and normalcy, though, while fantastical, is equally engaging. The soldiers search the exotic streets of Asian capitals, while also enjoying the freedom of being deeply AWOL. Paul Berlin's fantasy is desertion of a kind. But it is also survival. What happens when the soldiers catch up to Cacciato? Reality has a way of creeping into a story, making the long road a dark fantasy, a dream from which we awake again to brutality and ambiguity. The book is littered with eye-opening observations and insights. O'Brien tells us of a man inventing the story of his time in Vietnam. Along the way, he tells us of the nature of invention, imagination, and the power that has to help us endure. Highly recommended.
(For this book, O'Brien was awarded the 1979 National Book Award for fiction.)
Also by Tim O'Brien: [July, July]