Customer Reviews

A MIDNIGHT CLEAR.

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A Midnight Clear is a stunning, poignant, passionate paean to the futility and tragedy of war. The setup is 6 very young, very bright US soldiers sent on a reconnaissance mission to a chateau deep within the Ardennes Forest in France in December 1944. Use of symbolism deepens the book's meaning: the men (read "boys") play chess and bridge (without cards) with deadly passion, one is called Mother because of his mother-hen neatnik qualities, another is called Father because he's a devout Catholic who left seminary cuz he didn't think he was good enough. Their leader is Wont (his name is William Knott, AKA Will Knot, AKA `will not,' thus: won't, usually shortened to Wont), a kid recently promoted to sergeant who hasn't had time to sew his stripes on yet.
So they're in this abandoned chateau in the middle of this isolated forest, burning furniture to try to keep warm, and the dialogue and situations are hilarious and horrible, but mostly hilarious...but this is a book about war, so you know bad stuff is going to happen. Reading the first ¾ of the book, you feel kinda guilty laughing, cuz in the back of your mind, you're wondering which and how many of these kids are going to die.
Then they realize there are 6-8 Germans nearby, and their fear is palpable - until it becomes clear that the Germans are just as young and scared as they are, just as sick of war, and even more importantly, the Germans know they're about to lose the war, and they want to surrender.
The denouement, when it comes, occupies no more than perhaps one single page, maybe just a couple of paragraphs, and the rest of the book becomes a weird, tragic, very believable mythic, religious, mystery play/metaphor sort of thing with the kind of events and writing that keep you riveted to the last sentence.
Highest possible recommendation. I swear it'll eventually become a classic.

A handful of young GI's are stuck in a snowy wilderness somewhere in northern France at the end of the Battle of the Bulge. Christmas time is approaching,and they are hoping and praying for salvation from this truly unpleasant situation. Perhaps holing up somewhere will keep them from from freezing to death, and hopefully the enemy is nowhere near. This strategy backfires when they realize that Germans have found them. Even worse, some monstrous German tanks make a very alarming appearance.Possibly, the German soldiers are as scared and sick of this war as they are...Maybe there's even a way to communicate all this to the enemy, especially as the holiday gets nearer by the day. The rest is a story that should be among the classics, one that Mr. Wharton tells perfectly. Simply, it can't be beat, and the movie was just as good. Both underrated,little known gems.

"Vaughan! You have to read this book"
"What book?"
"Ohhh, its called A MIDNIGHT CLEAR... written by the same guy who is responsible for BIRDY!"

The next day I purchase it on AMAZON.

The following day the book comes.

That same day I finish it.

That day is today.

Let me say, that this book was is an amazing piece of work. Its a classic about World War II, but nothing really too in-depth which would really confuse the heck out of me. A simple plot, but a very unique one, that really does play on your emotional side. I kid you not, my heart was pumping so fast at times, and I just couldn't control myself from screaming into the pages! Ahh, a book sometimes does this for me - and this one did it for me.

A group of 5 soldiers, lead by WONT, really don't care about the war, and rather are discovering themselves through eachother. They hope that the enemy isn't too near, and they hope that their daily lives can be as less stressful as possible. This all changes though when a group of German soldiers seem to be in a very playful mood, and start joking around with the Americans. Leaving messages here and there, which all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. But a piece goes missing at the end. Read it!

Wharton goes back in this book to his adventures during the Second World War. Lured into the Army by a promise of receiving free university education ("we will need engineers to rebuild the world after the world") young Will Knot ends up in an intelligence military unit all the members of which have impressively high IQ (the decision of some military genius).
The book concentrates on events which took place around Christmas 1944 - when an attempt of striking a deal with Germans who wanted only to surrender went disastrously wrong. But it has much more to tell than just a story - it is Wharton's protest against all wars written as a response to Ronald Reagan's administration's attempt to bring back obligatory military service. Be prepared to get shocked because Wharton goes all the way to prove his point.

A book is unlike any other, a mandatory read for those interested in a deep thought provoking novel about the second world war. Unlike a Hollywood novel, this one demands you think and assess the situation at every turn and never hesitates to remind you war no matter how much Hollywood likes to glorify it, it is hell. If you like the book the movie is almost as good.

This group of soldiers attached to the elite intelligence outfit known as the A.S.T.P.E.R.S. are extremely likable. This odd assortment of guys are the kind of people you want to be assigned with if you ever find yourself in similar circumstances...snowed in to a remote observation post. They are each very human and each has qualities which make life seem like very valuable goods indeed. The waste of war effects each one differently. On that title midnight things do not go as planned and there is more waste but this novel with very little combat in it does make things very clear, no one wants to fight. The character interaction makes this a worthwhile read. Not a big anti-war novel but a small one with a lyric attraction.

The back cover of my book sites Wharton as a painter who writes. I think it is the other way around. I have never read a more moving, and readable book. This is a story that will stay with you for a long time. Saving Private Ryan was good, but in this book you know the hearts and minds of the characters. Don't miss this one.

I first read this book four christmas's ago and have read about this same time every year since. I guess its my own personal Christmas gift to myself after choking on all the commercial hype from this time of year. Reading the sad tragic tale of these kids ordeal in the soon to be Battle of the Bulge is a great way to help one realize how well it is and how bad it could be. The characters are fleshed out very well and are quite believably goofy, funny, lonely and touchingly in need of each other. The way Will Knotts character slips from the present tense of December 1944 to the present tense of an adult in his 50's always comes as a surprise and is one my favorited things about the book. After putting it down I'm always truly haunted by the story and touched by how great a sacrifice the men of that generation made.

I know of only two books that I have enjoyed LESS than the films that were based on them, but this is one of them (the other was Groom's "Gump"). Wharton has a cracker of a plot but burdens it with a narrative voice that is often inconsistent to the point of distraction. That, paired with a drastic lack of subtlety, made this a chore to plough through, despite the novel's numerous strengths.

For example, the protagonist narrating the story makes no claims to omniscience, and even shows, for obvious purposes of tension-building, bona fide surprise during crucial scenes. However, there is another narrative voice that cuts in twice, for obvious purposes of emotion-building, and this voice belongs to the older, wiser narrator, who is writing about all of this years and years later. His intrusions, occasional though they are, are an incongruity I found difficult to swallow, distractions that impeded my efforts to pick up again the thread of the story. Such narrative asides are also surefire signs that an author is conscious of the fact that his or her main narrative layer isn't doing the work it's supposed to: conveying the appropriate emotion. Hence, we get this: "My eyes are full of tears just remembering this, years later, on my houseboat, in France," yada, yada. If you have to remind me to cry, there's something wrong. (Likewise, if you have to have the characters say each other's names EVERY TIME they open their mouths, it seems a defensive compensation for the fact that the characters are insufficiently delineated. These guys repeat each other's names so conscientiously and so often I thought they were trying to sell something.) There's also the annoying manner in which we are told that this is all being written down, while all the while the narrative voice is most assuredly a relaxed, spoken one, complete with unmistakably oral colloquialisms and syntax.

This is all very picky, but more substantial problems gave me pause during a book that I desperately wanted to like. There is a really amazing imbalance between the attention given to trivialities like the narrator's digestive problems and the attention given, on the other hand, to a moment marked explicitly as a sort of epiphany. Granted, much of the focus on the humdrum and the everyday helps to really drive home the sort of boredom punctuated by moments of terror that we're told war is; but this scene in the attic of a snowbound chateau in the middle of God-knows-where, during which, the narrator tells us, he learned who he was and what he was made for, during which he gets his calling...why on earth don't we get the kind of detail here that we get when we read about bridge hands or chess moves?

If you can wade through this sort of stuff, or if you can block out some of these discrepancies, then you're in for a real treat when you hit the last 50 pages, which are much more tightly, understatedly, and beautifully written. My overall opinion, though, is that Keith Gordon's film version of "A Midnight Clear" simply tells a great story better than Wharton's prose. The film cuts to the chase without losing its way, enhances the build of the novel, and deals with some of the weightiest moments with much more subtlety than Wharton seems willing or able to muster.

The book is well written and deals with a group of young soldiers (German and American) that find themselves in a unique situation during WWII. How they handle this and how it goes terribly wrong is actually a good study of the mindset of many young soldiers that have been sent to kill other young soldiers by their governments and politicians that really have no clue what actual combat does to a man.
This work makes it pretty clear what really goes on in the minds of soldiers. The reason I gave it only 4 stars was just the fact that it seemed a little 'slow' it its' development and, in my humble opinion, had a rather odd, uneventful ending.