Flanders [Hardcover]

Patricia Anthony (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1998

World War I, Flanders, Northern France: the British trenches grow wet and foul. For Travis Lee Stanhope, a Texan sharpshooter serving in an English unit, the war is not hell, but home. Each night he ventures into No Man's Land between his comrades and the German trenches, and waits. At dawn, he begins the methodical killing of enemy troops. Then he returns. His numbers are exemplary. But Travis Lee is changing. His senses are ravaged by the unending scream of shells overhead. His mind numbed by too many rations of rum. His soul bled dry by the constant death all around him. But in his dreams, something still lives. He sees a world like the war, where living is the same as walking dead. But the people there are his comrades killed in action. Sometimes they are stranded with him on the battlefield. Sometimes they lie in glass-covered graves in an Eden-like cemetery. He tries to ease their pain. But no one can ease his pain. And it will take more than death, and more than dreams, to make Travis Lee realize that he may have a function in this war beyond killing his enemies.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Patricia Anthony's previous novels, from her 1993 debut, Cold Allies, until recently were all SF with a disturbing grasp of alienness and dislocation. Now Flanders brings us close to another kind of alien--Travis Lee Stanhope, farm boy, scholar, and a U.S. volunteer among the strangely accented British soldiers of the Great War. He tells his story in eloquent, pungent letters to a brother at home, moving from the beauty of spring in 1916 France to the dank hell of the trenches: mud, rats, lice, gas, foulness, death. Stanhope is highly rated as a sniper but for a while drinks excessively to blur the horror. His kindly captain is another poetry-quoting misfit, despised by other officers for his Jewishness. One fellow soldier fits in all too well, being so fond of killing that he doesn't stop at Germans; and his murders have terrible repercussions for both Stanhope and the captain. Touches of fantasy or magic realism are supplied by visions of a good and tranquil place, a graveyard where Death is a lovely girl in calico and where one after another of Stanhope's slaughtered comrades and enemies walk through his dreams, peaceful at last. An extraordinary war novel, hauntingly sad but with glints of hope and humor too. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

In Flanders Fields, where so many died so horribly during WWI, an American volunteer named Travis Lee Stanhope finds terror, death, forgiveness and, ultimately, an odd sort of salvation. Anthony (God's Fires), one of speculative fiction's brightest talents, has written a novel of the Great War that is worthy of comparison to Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Travis Lee is a wonderfully complex character, a wild boy from Texas who had the brains to win a scholarship to Harvard, a survivor of childhood abuse who hates his alcoholic father but fears he may be turning into him. Uncomfortable at home and at school, Travis, like many young Americans in 1916, enlists in the British army in search of adventure. What he finds instead is the monstrous human meatgrinder that is Flanders in northern France. Few writers have succeeded so well as Anthony in describing the horrors of trench warfare, the mud and disease, the rotting bodies and unending bombardment, the virtually universal madness that turns men into killers and rapists. Travis Lee is a talented sharpshooter, but as months of terror go by and the number of his kills grows, he beings to see things, at first in his dreams and later on the battlefield itself. Ghosts begin to haunt him, unwilling or unable to leave the shell craters and barbed wire where their lives ended. Told by a battlefield chaplain that he's gifted with the Second Sight, Travis Lee repeatedly finds himself wandering in an unearthly cemetery, a melancholy place that nonetheless hints at the possibility of eternal life. This is a harrowing and beautiful novel, demonstrating?again?that Anthony is one of our finest writers, in and out of the genre.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 354 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover; 1st edition (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441005284
• ISBN-13: 978-0441005284
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,008,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The next cult classic, January 26, 2000

By 

Daniel Conover - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flanders (Hardcover)

What we have in "Flanders" is one of the greatest yet most obscure novels of the 1990s - a sales flop that not only received universal critical praise, but inspires strange passion in practically everyone who reads it. And it should be the next book you read.

Patricia Anthony is not only one of the best writers in contemporary fiction, but perhaps the most courageous. While her previous works stretched the boundaries of "science fiction," "Flanders" departs the genre entirely. This bold new direction left her publishing house sputtering in confusion, with frustrating results for everyone. Flanders represents an author with a secure genre career abandoning that security to follow her own path.

Here we have one of the great books of the past decade, yet because it was not marketed in any meaningful way, almost no one knows it even exists. I discovered it by accident, rummaging through new books at the library. I took it home, opened it up, and it promptly squashed me like a tater bug on the front grill of a Peterbuilt. In the months since, I have enjoyed steering other people to the book and waiting for their reaction: everyone I know who has read the book comes out of the experience not only in love with it, but moved by it. This is a life-changing book, a cult classic in the making. If it is possible for a book - abandoned by a confused and indifferent publishing industry - to take on a life of its own, then this is the book that will do it.

I cannot say this strongly enough: Read this book. Now.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, achingly sad and so utterly haunting, December 2, 1999

By 

Kathryn H. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flanders (Hardcover)

Rarely have I come across a novel which so vividly portrays the brutal experience of trench warfare and the Great War. The never ending rotation from rest area to reserve trenches to front line and back again, with longer and longer periods spent at the front; of life lived in the trenches, surrounded not only by ceaseless imminent death, but by decay and disease, destruction and deep-set rot. The ways humanity finds to adapt and survive whilst living through such an experience, and how the infinite damage done by war is measued in even more than the millions of dead, as if they were not enough. It is also the damage of those who returned, the shell-shocked, the maimed and disfigured; the ones who returned physically whole, but altered, would never be the same again, who must learn to live once again in `normal' society, such a seemingly impossible task. The damage done to the earth herself, dug out, bombed and devastated, who swallowed all the bodies and blood and despair in her own collasping trenches.

There is also the hope, the friendships, likes and dislikes, the petty arguments, personal hatreds, prejudice, comradeship, laughter and sorrow and all other things so very human in these totally inhuman surroundings. Whislt the entire novel is set in Flanders during 1916, Anthony still manages to depict very well one of the true tragedies of war, the dislocation and isolation of the soldier, the manner in which such an experience makes it impossible for them to ever really fit back into society once again. Of knowing that even if they make it through the war alive, they are still going to have to live with it for the rest of their lives. After all, these were men and boys coming from relatively `normal' lives, and then they were handed a gun, taught to kill and told it was alright to be murderers for four years. To walk straight back into the old life afterwards was never going to be so simple.

That is perhaps one of the most powerful themes to this novel; the manner in which human beings can become accustomed to brutality and violence, how it becomes a way of life until they find themselves capable of murder and rape and savage cruelty. And the painful ironies of war; some bittersweet, such as Riddell, surrounded by the worst excesses of wartime death and destruction, in tears when learning of the natural death of his age-old mother; others just bitter, such as the combined fates of Miller and Leblanc (although I will not into more detail, for fear of spoiling the story.) "Half of my friends were murdered, sir" is all Stanhope can say when, in amongst the deaths of millions, the near justified murder of one individual soldier who had not been able to draw that increasingly blurry line between killing the Germans and killing anybody else, is singled out and prosecuted for all its worth, with terrible repercussions for all around.

Most of all, however, this is a book about hope. About redemption, and salvation. Finally, it's about forgiveness. Forgiving the enemy, who are not neccesarily the Germans - for after all, the Germans have done nothing except fight the same war and experience the same tragedies - but forgiving those around you, even those who seem mightily unforgivable. Mostly, it's just about forgiving yourself. There is a peace to be found in Anthony's novel of wartime destruction, a novel about human tragedy, filled with very human characters. A novel which is brilliantly haunting and achingly sad and still, in the end, so ultimately hopeful. "It's love."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A special book with a timeless message, April 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Flanders (Hardcover)

In 1916, Texan Travis Lee Stanhope could have had anything. Harvard wanted the brilliant young man, who overcame child abuse. So what was this budding scholar doing in the trenches of Flanders during World War I. Like many of his fellow Americans, Travis has joined the British army seeking adventure. What he has gotten is a mud hole filled with death and disease that he now calls home.

Every dawn, Travis ventures into no-man's land between his side and the Germans to kill off some of his enemy. However, the battlefield and the endless bottles of rum are taking their toll on Travis' psyche. In life, Travis feels dead; but in his dreams, he feels alive. Ghosts begin to appear as Travis seems to have the uncanny ability to glimpse at an afterlife or perhaps he has just gone insane.

FLANDERS is the best war story in several years, may be decades. The story line graphically portrays the horror of war, especially the battles in the trenches during World War I. Travis, who journeys to salvation within his mind, is a great character because he provides the audience with a TV screen to the horrors of FLANDERS Field. Once again, the incredibly talented Patricia Anthony demonstrates why she is one of the top authors of the nineties with a classic war novel that one day will rank with the great war tales of the century.

Harriet Klausner