17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SO MUCH IN SUCH A LITTLE BOOK!, March 8, 2005
This review is from: Articles of War: A Novel (Hardcover)
This one, I admit, caught me off guard. I have not read a work this well written in some time now. This is bare bones stuff. I hate to compare this work with any others, but must admit that Red Badge of Courage kept popping into my mind. This work was just as haunting, just as sparse and just as well done. The story here alone is worth the read, but the real treat is the author's ability to write and write well! I admit to having rather archaic taste in writing, but do feel that most who love well written words will appreciate this one. The author's style does take me back. I strongly suspect that we will be hearing more from Mr. Arvin, anyway, I hope so. Highly and strongly recommend this one. Thank you Mr. Arvin!
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bestiality of War: First Person Singular, April 22, 2005
This review is from: Articles of War: A Novel (Hardcover)
In ARTICLES OF WAR Nick Arvin has, in this first Novel (he has previously published short stories under the name of 'In the Electric Eden: Stories') stepped into the echelon of writers who are able to credibly recreate the horrors of war without finding the need to justify the concept of war as a viable means for resolution of issues. This is an exceptional novel that relentlessly defines the passion, the fear, the atrocities, the visceral responses to the annhilation of fellow human beings, and places those responses squarely in the body of one terrified eighteen-year-old boy. The effect is devastating and the result is one of the most vehement antiwar novels ever written.
George Tilson, nicknamed 'Heck' because of his refusal to use profanity, is a simple Iowa boy who by draft enlists in the Army to please his newspaper publisher father. He has no political fervor, no adolescent need to prove his virility: Heck simply knows how to follow orders, place training camp in the role of playacting, and accept his shipment to Omaha Beach, Normandy in 1944. A loner by nature, Heck observes his environment, is shipped to various campaigns, and remains a passive severely frightened youth. Once he is in battle he is horrified by the killing, the strewn dead bodies, witnessing the implosion of a recruit from a land mine, the stinging deaths of fellow soldiers, the look in the eyes of dead Germans, discovering the bodies of French victims, inadvertently sludging through corpses, the decimation of the landscape, the filth of living in rain-gutted foxholes. At one point he encounters a French family who befriends him and he is shown kindness by the young Claire with whom he finds momentary solace in the caves of France, becoming tangent to his emerging sexuality yet fearful of fulfilling his desires. The little family disappears and his quests to find them again are useless. His encounter with Claire and her gift of a tiny silver music box are his constant attachments to hope, to the concept that he may survive to find Claire again.
The war eats Heck's soul and mind and eventually he follows the urge to find a way out of the battlefield by arranging his own gunshot wound to the wrist inflicted by a German sniper. This act of cowardice joined by his inability to find justice in the idea of war weakens Heck to the point that he is unable to eat without vomiting, and unable to hide from his shame of being a coward. Heck begins to harden after a certain incident and when he is assigned to a secret mission, he consents to go. The mission is to be a part of the firing squad that will execute deserter Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik, a mission that will forever haunt young Heck. (This incident is based on fact, as the author informs us at the beginning and end of the book.)
How Heck deals with all these inward damages inflicted upon him by the war forms the final chapters of this intense book. The war ends and Heck is so incapacitated by his guilt that he signs up for another tour of duty in France and it is during this tour that the unsettling events of the post-war effects take on significant meaning and draw an end to the story.
Nick Arvin writes in spare sentences, much the way his main character would process information. But that is not to say that Arvin cannot wax eloquent or burn images into our minds that become as indelible as the effects of the war on Heck. "Heck began to understand that this was hell: a rainy woods, a place of mud and standing water and deep cold, made complete by the explosions that forced you to burrow into the muck and lie in it and be glad for it....The damaged trees were stricken, ossified. When it rained the trees dripped, providing no protection. A fog was trapped or confused in the forest and dwelled there all day, at its thickest creating a white darkness. The mists seem to absorb the night, and eventually night reconquered the mists, and in this fashion the idea of sunlight was erased."
As poetic as the writing just quoted is, Arvin can also conjure the unimaginable. "At one time he had expected the war would go by like a snake whose tail he would eventually see, and that would be the end. But now he saw it to be more like a river that is always going by and of which one expects no end. One day he watched a GI urinate into the open mouth of a German corpse. The next day he entered a town recently abandoned by the Germans and found the body of an American soldier who had been literally crucified."
ARTICLES OF WAR places the reader in the midst of WW II and never spares a moment of grisly detail. For this Vet from another war, this book, more than most other novels about war, captures the harsh realities of battle on the line and in the minds of those sent to fight. If ever there were an antiwar statement in the form of brilliant prose, this is it. This is a tough book to read, but an inordinately important one, and an exceedingly fine novel by a gifted poet. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, April 05
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Gem, August 5, 2007
This story is a gem. It's compact, serene, and powerful. The writing is clear and sober. The main character is wonderfully complex, given the spare story and brief time we get to spend with him. I'd rank this up there with "Going After Cacciato" or "Slaughterhouse Five" for best war novels ever. "Articles of War" is a finely-crafted portrait of reluctance. Sample of prose: "It began to rain, and he wanted in his tent listening to the drumming of it. Idly, he tried to remember the songs his mother would sing in the kitchen, but he could recall only a phrase or two. He'd never been able to carry a melody himself. In the mess tent at lunch he sat alone. Then he pulled on a plastic rain poncho and set off to find Albert, Ives, and Claire at the chateau. While he walked the rain slackened to a misting drizzle, then tapered to nothing. Low wraits of fog rose from the hollows of the land, looking solid and sulky and unlikely to retreat before the feeble sunlight that filtered through the ashen clouds." When war comes, the writing is no less blunt or observant. When hard choices must be made, the interior thoughts of "Heck" are gripping and vivid. Just when you think you've got the sense of this novel, the plot takes an interesting and fascinating turn and you have to agree that war, as the book so bluntly makes clear, is a universe unto itself. I'm glad I own a hardback. Nick Arvin is a fantastic writer.
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