Customer Reviews

The Eleventh Man

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4 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(3)
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Ivan Doig has written a book that takes place during World War II, but this book is not ABOUT the war. Instead, he has written a touching, sometimes wrenching chronicle of one man's quest to 'beat the odds'. Although this novel takes place over two years during a terrible time in history, it is not a historical account of the war. It is the story of one man's search for his purpose in life, always viewed through the lens of what might happen to that life if the odds don't go his way. I loved this book, and did not want to turn the last page. Every one of Mr. Doig's books has deeply touched my heart, and this one is no different. If you know Mr. Doig's works, you know what I mean.

A relatively brief book by contemporary standards, "The Eleventh Man" is muscular, yet trim and solid as a Montana ranch-hand; as thoughtful and wise as an old newspaper editor. A skilled craftsman, writer Ivan Doig has used minimal space to create dozens of memorable characters and to weave more than a dozen individual stories into a novel that was even better with a second reading.

Not one to theorize nor to waste time on gratuitous action, Doig writes about the real world and its unexpected adventures. Many of his earlier works have dealt with pioneer lives and hardships, as the western territories were settled by dedicated, risk-taking seekers of new lives. They have dealt with brutal forces of nature. "The Eleventh Man" deals with many of those forces, as they took place in the 1940's, pressurized and traumatized by World War II, adding the thoughtless violence of war as it affects individuals and their highly believable lives. He puts names and faces on heroic characters, who suffer unheroic deaths in a cause that has been often been distorted and idealized. And he recognizes the many unkind and petty things that people do.

With his hero, former Montana football player Ben Reinking, his heroine, wise and lively aviator Cass Standish, Doig lovingly expresses his fascination with people and with human situations. Throughout, he expresses his love love of nature and its enormity. How wonderful to find a writer who sees and hears the fundamental things that enrich our lives, and who expresses them so well.

Ben, the hero of this World War II drama, was a member of a Montana college football team that went undefeated in 1941. Because his father is a small town newspaper editor, he is plucked from pilot training to become a military reporter at the service of a shadowy but all-powerful propaganda outfit. His assignment is to write profiles in courage of all the other team members, now fighting the war in different theaters.

Ben also falls in love with Cass, the hard-bitten female pilot who is helping fly planes from Montana to Alaska where they can be handed over to the Russian air force. Trouble is, Cass is married and her husband is busy somewhere in the Pacific fighting the Japanese.

The premise and set-up for this book are promising and the leading characters are engaging. One quickly starts rooting for Ben and Cass, who grab precious moments away from their assignments for energetic coupling. These scenes have a gritty "film noir" character that is very compelling.

(SPOILER ALERT) As Ben pursues his assignment, his teammates are afflicted by terrible luck. One by one, they start dying, even the ones with apparently safe assignments. We learn that at the heart of the winning season lay an awful secret. Is the dream team cursed?

It is completely unrealistic that the military would proceed with Ben's dumbass assignment once the deathtoll starts climbing. It would have been a morale-buster on the homefront. And Ben's smarty-pants correspondence through telex messages with his superiors started to with this reader cloy pretty quickly.

My biggest criticism of this book is that it doesn't bring us enough of the terror and also the exhilaration of war. My father was in World War II (see Guarded By Angels: How My Father And Uncle Survived Hitler And Cheated Stalin my memoir of his experiences.) The war scenes in this book don't feel real to me. Neither is Ben's grief convincing at the death of his teammates. The only one we really get to know is Jake, yet his death happens offstage and is tossed off as an afterthought. Ben is full of feeling for Cass -- yet is soul is full of emptiness for his football buddies.

It feels false, as if the author did not go deep enough. This book works well as a love story but falls short as a war story.

The Eleventh Man is Ivan Doig's fictional meditation on the perplexing question of why a given group of farflung American active combatants might suffer far higher mortality than the national average. Ben Reinking was one of the 1941 "Supreme Team" of Montana's Treasure State University (based loosely on real Montan college players). The former teammates all served their country after Pearl Harbor, believing most of their number would return home and continue on with their lives. What if, however, this group hung out on the edge of the probability bell curve where "bitter arithmetic" held sway, where the law of averages was out of whack?

The novel simultaneously explores unsung battle theaters and underpublicized war arrangements. TPWP (a Doig fictional stand-in for the actual Office of War Information's news arms) intended to use the Supreme Team as a public "morale" tool, and it commandeered Ben away from his pilot's training to become a war correspondent and write about his former teammates. Since the men were stationed in various combat zones around the globe, Ben traveled far and wide to interview them. But they didn't take part in the hallmarks of the war we now recall most such as D-Day in Europe.

Jake Eisman, for example, flew Lend Lease B-17 Flying Fortress bombers to Alaska where the planes were turned over to Soviet pilots. In one of his most engrossing adventures, Ben hitched a ride in the Plexiglas nose cone of a bomber Jake delivered.

Ben also traveled to the Olympic Peninsula near La Push, Washington to patrol isolated headlands with Sigmund Prokosch of the U.S. Coastguard. Sig kept watch for Japanese submarines at sea, the chance of some offloads onto land from those subs, and balloon bombs that could set the vast forests ablaze. Sig was engaged. She was called Ruby, and when Sig said her name, Ben thought "the word glowed as if it were her namesake gem. Love and the salt taste of absence, old as Odysseus...."

Sig wasn't the only one in love. At East Base, a squadron of women pilots test flew various planes for the Air Transport Command (yes, this female squadron was based on real history too). In the book, Captain Cass Standish was their leader. She was also Ben's lover. Her husband, a Montaneer, had been off fighting Japs in the Pacific jungles while she, a WASP, served in this unusual female duty stateside. What would they all do if and when the Montaneer returned?

Meanwhile more of Ben's gridiron buddies were dying, sometimes within almost arm's reach, more often far away. The reader becomes increasingly anxious that all members of the Supreme Team might perish. Will they? Who will survive? Will there be any reason for who dies and who doesn't?

The Eleventh Man is a work that requires attention. It doesn't have an straightforward structure, especially at the beginning. It jumps fitfully in time and place, sometimes depriving the reader of background. For instance, one has to largely accept the proposition that the Supreme Team is really a special group because very little of the team's gridiron time is explored. What is clear is that the crux of their football career had to do with a twelfth man. Was his death by overexertion his own fault, the result of coach hazing, or something else?

As the reader progresses into the heart of the novel, however, its themes and characters emerge as out of a fog. Ben, his parents, Cass and her squadron, and guys like Jake and Sig matter. So, when Doig dispatches certain people is a hurry toward the end, one gets the feeling the author was tired and just wanted to finish. Perhaps, Doig could have developed more up front and at the end, while trimming some paragraphs? Various passages could get their points across with fewer sentences.

On the one hand, the subject matter couldn't be sterner stuff: the human costs of war, the vagaries of survival. On the other hand, the novel radiates an ironic vibe too. It's almost as if the joke the cosmos is playing by repudiating the law of averages invites a jab of rebellion from Doig: he tries to find order again. Human beings try desperately to assign coherence and laws to our tenuous situation on this earth, but in the end, the "bitter arithmetic" adds up by rules we don't yet understand.

The Eleventh Man isn't without shortcomings, but its metaphysical ponderings, its remarkable reconnection with some facts about World War II that many have forgotten or never yet learned, and its memorable characters make it a worthy, meaty novel.

Ivan Doig is a much better writer than this book would indicate. Doig tries to combine a love story (or two), a "lost youth" story (or eleven), a war story, a "military intelligence is an oxymoron" story, and a few other transparent plots (a plane downed in inhospitable wilderness--with a rescuer magically a few minutes away, deaths of characters more predictable than in a Miss Marple story) and winds up creating an unsatisfying mishmash that left me feeling cheated. This was the one book I asked my wife for as a Christmas present, and I couldn't wait to get started on it, since I have been a fan of Doig's for many many years. I think he got lazy on this one, and I hope that his next comes back up to the standard he has set for his novels.

The author had what would appear to be a good idea for a novel, a WW II novel built around a member of a championship football team chronicling the wartime experiences of his colleagues on the team
after they all enlisted in the war. I found that while the novel has its moments, there just aren't very many of them. I ran out of steam on page 216 ( not unlike some of the football teams I have followed ). I just couldn't get connected with the players and their experiences. There were too many players. Maybe it would have worked better for me if it had been a five member basketball team. And, there there was a love interest of the main character that just wasn't very interesting either. I've not read any of the author's other works and based on other reviews I will. But, I wouldn't recommend The Eleventh Man

This is a classic Doig look at a time of our American history that changed our lives -- WW II. It is a good read but lacks the prose continuity of his other works. His story about the heroes' affair with a married woman is not believable given the culture of the people in Montana. However, I am glad I read it.

I listened to this in audio form and found it to be another exhaustingly endless book by Ivan Doig. While his work may be better suited to physically seeing (and skipping over) the words, there are still too many of them; by the time you get to the end of the chapter, its a challenge to remember what the starting point was. The foundational story line and the characters held promise but were lost in the rambling minutia. My sense is that you are either a fan of this author or not with little middle ground.

the story had a belivable line to it. the chacters were people you would like to meet. The only part that left me hanging was the end. I felt like the author was trying to wrape it up and thats where it fell apart for me.

I am a big Doig fan and enjoyed this book as much as his others. My father and his 2 brothers are/were WWII veterans and wrote about their war experiences. I was struck at how often the characters in The Eleventh Man addressed the same issues and frustrations with military process that the Crawford brothers highlighted in their own memoirs. Then I looked at the current news and realized not much has changed.