Customer Reviews

Articles of War: A Novel

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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!

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

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.

Arvin's story collection was among my favorites in recent years, but I still hesitated to read this novel, fearing it was going to be bleak and depressing. But Arvin transports readers to a world that is singular and terrifying and yet strangely transcendent. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a dark, futuristic film will find the same otherworldliness in these pages -- a besieged countryside, a slowly breaking man, and the small victories that keep him surviving. There's no flinching in the telling; there's also no putting this book down once you're into the story. Brace yourself for the novel's climactic scene -- it's devastating and unforgettable.

by all who care about anyone who has ever experienced war. This is a rivetting description of fear and the degredation of war told through the eyes of a simple, everyday American. The definition of courage is a central theme that crecendos with a surprising event. Not a pleasant topic but the book is so well written that I couldn't put it down until it reached a very unexpected ending. Cudos to Nick Arvin. Excellant writer!

Articles of War reminds me of a rare gem that has been finely and professionally cut and polished. It is a precise and narrow vision of one man's experience in the combat hell that was World War II. Although the protagonist's nickname is Heck, because he refused to use profanity of any kind (a promise to his dead mother), he quickly learns of Hell in the Hurtgen forest and the infamous Battle of the Bulge, enduring the bone-chilling winter cold, the short supply of congealed canned rations, and the caked filth of living in cramped close quarters of underground bunkers, hiding from German snipers and artillery strikes, cowering with his equally terrified and traumatized squad mates like small burrowing animals.

Other reviewers have commented on parallels to Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, and the similarities are indeed inescapable, because Heck's fears of being a coward make up a central theme throughout the book. I was also reminded of one of the earliest Vietnam novels, a short book by William Pelfrey called The Big V, now out of print and difficult to find. But there too were many of the same images and characters to be found in Crane - the accidental wound, the running away in the face of the enemy, followed by a courageous charge up a hill. The fearful, doubt-torn protagonist, as well as "the tall soldier" - in Arvin's book blown to bits before Heck's eyes. There is the cathedral-like clearing encountered in the forest, the impersonal disc of the sun watching over it all, uncaring, unmoved. All of these elements from the Crane classic were in the Pelfrey novel, and are also here in Arvin's. The US Civil War, WWII, and Vietnam. The quintessential test of manhood in time of war, the finding out - courage and cowardice, that confusing and terrifying mixture - it's all here.

And then the surprising and riveting turn taken in the final twenty-five pages of the Arvin book, all based on historical fact, that gives the story its own unique twist. Elaborating on this would spoil the story for future readers, so I won't. Suffice it to say that war fiction seldom rises to this level. I will recommend it highly. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

A novella in the manner of The Red Badge of Courage, this is a tale of one soldier in WWII who finds himself to be a coward under fire. The point of view is extremely close. The author takes us deep within the perspective of Heck, the protagonist, and we never really come up for air. We begin with his arrival in Normandy a few days after D-Day. Close combat ensues very soon, and Heck sees some of the worst fighting of the war - the battles of Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge. During an artillery barrage, for instance, the author gives no overview of what is going on, but merely traps the reader within Heck's perspective, cowering within a shell hole, dirt in his mouth, screaming. The close point of view is effective for getting deep within the soldier's state of mind. That is the biggest accomplishment of this book, to so strongly imagine the psyche of a young man under fire. One of the better novels I've read about war.

In writing a work of fiction about World War II, an author must do something to stand out in the vast landscape of the genre. Nick Arvin has an interesting premise centered around the true story of Eddie Slovik, a World War II deserter. Unfortunately, the story seemed cold and was unable to engage me as a reader. Even knowing what was going to happen, I kept waiting for the action to take place or something to happen. The main character only seems to feel fear and reminisce about a girl he met once. Certainly there is more to war. The drawn out passages that add little to the story make me believe this would be better delivered as a short story.

George "Heck" Tilson did not want to go to war. Along the way, he falls for a French woman that he later finds to be pregnant. Is she carrying his child? While George's thoughts drift toward Clarie, he realizes he is a coward. We tries to find any excuse to avoid killing, whether getting lost or a flesh wound. His cowardice seems to come to a head when he is sanctioned as an executioner in the execution of deserter Eddie Slovik.

The ending is predictable even though the author leaves some question about the outcome. I also could have done without the graphic descriptions of Claire's anatomy. This aspect of the story reminded me more of a romance novel or chic-lit book. With all of the hopes that I had for this book, I was disappointed. With all of the potential this story had, I think he could have done more.

This novel is a sensitive study of an individual caught within the maw of enormous forces. There's no big picture, grand vision of the war here. It's one guy trying to make his way through a world gone crazy. The enormity of how unprepared he is and the barbarity he's faced with is almost unfathomable, and yet it's totally believable. I don't doubt that stories like this unfolded in this and in every war. Arvin does, however, bring it to the page with a personal, intimate immediacy. I especially connected with the confusion Heck faces with his feelings for the French girl. The way he's drawn toward her, but then flees from their sexual encounter, only to then decide he loves her and pines terribly after her... It all makes sense. This guy is just a kid. He should be fumbling through romantic situations at home. Instead he's asked to risk his life and/or to kill every day. Yes, there's reason to be confused and have emotions careen out of control. Arvin gives us all of this with a sure, steady hand, that places real characters in dire situations.

I do wish the book had been longer. It feels truncated at the end. After the firing squad scene - which is tremendous - it jumps forward ahead of portions of Heck's story that I don't know why Arvin didn't give to us in detail. It does seem rushed, or as if he was exhausted by his efforts and just had to wrap it up. Having said this, though, it's a niggling complaint about a stunning debut. Arvin, if he has more books in him, could well be a writer of note soon. We need more novels like this one. Hopefully, this author will give us more.

The final push in the European theatre, WWII, as seen through the eyes of one soldier. Grim, lucid, and lyrical (despite subject). I am unsure why I liked this book so much. Was it excellent writing, remarkable reading, or both?
Superbly read by J.D. Cullum.