Customer Reviews

The Two-Headed Eagle: A Novel

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The third of Biggins's tales (after "A Sailor of Austria" and "The Emperor's Coloured Coat") of Austrio-Hungarian Imperial naval officer Otto Prohaska. This entry chronicles his five months duty on the Italian front with an air reconnaissance unit. This book, more so than the previous two, manages to project the hopelessness, meaninglessness, and horror of WWI. Although Biggins foreshadows the deaths of various characters, the tragedy of their circumstance is always intact and immutable. As always, the technical aspect of the book is thrilling and captivating. Just as he did with submarines in "A Sailor of Austria," Biggins masterfully describes the emergence and rapid development of the airplane as an instrument of war. Reading this will shatter all preconceptions about the era of biplanes and the "Red Baron." The distinguishing feature of this entry in the series is its melancholy mood, which the reader cannot help but adopt.

"The Two-Headed Eagle" is quite possibly the best war novel in English since "The Caine Mutiny." By turns witty, farcical, and intense, this book captures the essence of World War I, surely the craziest war -- at least the craziest major war -- ever fought by so-called civilized society.

The book is episodic -- closer to four or five novellas than a single unified novel -- but that's one of its strengths, giving the narrative an almost kaleidoscopic quality that helps to convey the atmosphere of two of history's most confusing and disjointed phenomena -- the polyglot Habsburg Empire and the war itself. A great deal of action and character are packed into just four months of 1916. Yet Biggins has such a clear grasp of his story that the story itself never becomes confusing.

The book's humor is a great asset as well. Wit runsthrough the book, beginning with its title -- "The Two-Headed Eagle" refers both to the symbol of the Habsburg state and the two-seater airplane with an NCO pilot theoretically commanded by an officer-observer. Satire and even farce make their appearances. One of the best episodes involves the atttempt to execute a deserter, featuring a bureaucratic dispute over who gets to shoot him -- this abbreviated summary may not sound funny, but you will be rolling on the floor when you read it, I promise. Then there is the thorough historical research that has gone into the novel -- including the ethnic infighting of the multinational Empire (which contributes richly to the humor).

But this isn't just a comedy -- far fromit. Biggins' grimly concrete descriptions of life and death on the Isonzo Front are almost photographic. Biggins has the gift of conveying the futility and waste of war -- this war in particular -- without ever seeming overwrought or self-righteous.

Biggins' protagonist, Otto Prohaska, may be a bit too good to be true -- a paragon of civility, common sense and integrity, also heroic, witty, and cultured. Yet like his creator, Otto never seems priggish; he tells the stories engagingly. Prohaska's voice (he narrates the story in the first person) really does sound to me the way I'd expect an Austrian officer of WWI to sound. There are a couple of solecisms -- "orientated" for "oriented," "prospectus" for "prospect" -- but then, English isn't Otto's first language, nicht wahr?

All in all, this is a terrific book.

Biggins has produced another scorcher of a book. Well written and packed with enough technical detail to please anyone. This book covers the period when Prohaska is sent to fly on the Isonzo front after allegedly sinking a German submarine by accident.
Biggin's keeps the story buzzing along with a blend of action, humour and a large dose of the ridiculous. I can thoroughly recommend it.

While I am here I would also like to recommend another Biggins novel, "Tomorrow the World". This covers Prohaska's stint at the K.U.K. Naval Academy and his experiences on a voyage of exploration on the S.M.S. Windischgratz. I was fortunate enough to find a copy in London a few years ago and I haven't seen another one since. Anyone who has read the other Prohaska novels will get a kick out it. If you can find it read it!

John Biggins third novel detailing the exploits of Otto Prohaska (his Austrian naval officer protagonist),this time concerning his several months of duty in the Austrian Imper- ial and Royal Flying Corps in between his tours as U-Boat commander which were featured in the author's first novel, A SAILOR OF AUSTRIA. Biggins has an astonishing knowledge and grasp of the geosocial details of the time; one could swear that he had lived as his protagonist in a previous life.Especially intriguing is the novel's perspective, told in flashback by the 100-year-old Prohaska who lives in a nursing home on the English coast, his memory jarred by a box of old WW1 photos as described in the first novel.

Otto Prohaska, the hero of several other novels set in the Austro-Hungarian naval service before and during WWI, returns in this book for a stint flying over the front between Italy and Austria. Between a pilot with whom he can only communicate in Latin, a commander obsessed with bureaucratic minutiae, the rickety airplanes of the time, crash-landings, and Italians who want to use him for target practice, life is never dull.

One reason I liked this book was that it reminded me that there was a lot more to WWI than the famous Western Front. The Italian high command made Kitchener and Foch look like military geniuses, and the bitterness of the returned Italian veterans is quite understandable.

I was enthusiastic to begin this work, but from the very first paragraph of the first chapter, I began to fear that it was going to be a chore to read.
The first chapter seemed to be so obviously and painfully a "frame" construction, which means, from those first few words, I saw it merely as a device to enter the story Biggins really wanted tell. While there is nothing at wrong with a frame or the use of literary devices to aid the storyteller in the telling of a story, we should hope they are used "invisibly" or at least to the degree of craft that engenders a respectful notice of their use.
By chapter two, however, I began to settle into Biggins's world, and I had the feeling that the nature of the writing had switched tracks, that it had suddenly become infused, or that finally Biggins was telling what he was excited about: WWI aircraft and his hero. (The protagonist is a "hero" by the way, which can often be a bad thing. But he is a hero with lowercase "h," which is perhaps not such a bad thing.)
I do not question Biggins on any matter to do with planes, warships, aerial operations, or life in the Austrian-Hungarian army. He dishes out so many specifics and with such command that we can only accept what he says on these points.
I do question his judgment about how men and women interact: The scenes where our hero is talking with his wife are the absolute worst in the book, simply, because of the dialogue. These two speak as if they are no more intimate than strangers on a train. I'm not even referring to sexuality or any other highly complex human emotion between two people; I'm just talking about simple conversation. One tells the other things that simply should be known. The hero and his wife are not good friends, not good enemies, not even good casual acquaintances. What are they? Two dimensional to the point of embarrassment.
The other big man/woman relationship in the book is the one between the hero's side-kick and his girlfriend. This relationship is a great deal more bearable than the hero's one to his wife, (probably because they speak Latin to one another, so we don't have to read Biggins's wretched dialogue) but it only becomes cute and, in the end, just as two dimensional as the first.
Another two dimensional character is the hero's commanding officer. Biggins tries too hard to show what a pencil-wielding, graph-plotting, tunnel-visioned fool he is. Biggins goes over the edge to absurdity, quite some distance beyond believability.
The cover of the book compares Biggins to Patrick O'Brian. O'Brian has been writing and publishing since the early 1950s, I believe, and Biggins has a little distance to travel before he can make his work hold together and "sing" as does O'Brian.
All THAT aside, there ARE some good things in this book. I find myself from time to time thinking of the aerial combat and realizing just how dangerous it was, and I have to acknowledge Biggins's skill in telling about those things: planes and the war.
This is a good book if you can live with all its faults, which is true for any book, and for most things in life, for that matter. For genre writing, I think it falls just above average