Customer Reviews

The War Lover

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I read a lot, I'm reviewing this book not as an expert but as a reader. The story is OK, it has some good thoughts, but in my opinion it's not Very good or Excellent, so I give my opinionated rating of 3 stars. Doesn't mean the book isn't great, just that, to me, it doesn't compare to very good or excellent, 5 star stories/novels. Sufficiently philosophic, and good detail of WW2 American airborne.

Set in England during WW II, this suspenseful novel tells about the 24th (and last) mission flown by a group of airmen, with special emphasis on the pilot Buzz Marrow and co-pilot Charles Boman. Marrow is the daring, talented, overly macho leader whom everyone in the crew looks up to - except Boman, who has learned something about him from his lover Daphne. Two separate storylines wend their way through the novel, one concerned strictly with the mission at hand, the other going back in time and relating character background of the principal people.

In what he considers a major act of betrayal Boman learns from Daphne after she has slept with Marrow that Marrow is basically in love with his plane (named "The Body"), with the destructive power he wields during his bombing raids, with war itself - all in the most erotic of ways. In sleeping with him she reveals to Marrow his true nature, the knowledge of which he takes with him on that 24th mission, which ends disastrously with the plane crashing into the sea and Marrow choosing to go down with the sinking plane rather than be rescued.

Hersey develops his story with great assurance; the scenes with Bowman and Daphne as their feelings for each other blossom are very well done and believable. Not so believable is Daphne's motivation to sleep with Marrow (she's a strong character and seems as if she'd be above his caveman brutishness), but her justifying it to Boman as a reaction to her feeling that Boman didn't really love her and was coming to the end of his time in England anyway is honest enough to dilute much of the anger he's feeling toward her. It's a wise conclusion to the Daphne-Boman affair, even if it's just a bit too calculating as part of the plot structure. The novel presents an interesting and intense story of love in a number of ramifications within a wartime setting: love for others, self-love, and self-loathing in the name of love. Well done.

John Hersey has created a wonderfully thought-provoking book in The War Lover. Hersey combines a familiar setting, World War II, with unfamiliar human emotions -- emotions only experienced by those who fought in the war. Hersey also has a gift for using flashbacks to enlighten the reader about the underlying reasons for a character's thoughts, feelings, or actions.

One doesn't have to enjoy war literature to enjoy this book. It reaches way beyond the war, right into the human spirit.

I suppose it takes guts to write an anti-war novel which takes place in World War II, because by attempting to discredit the war effort against Hitler, as The War Lover (and Catch-22) does, the author implicitly states that any war against any tyrant is improper, illegal and immoral. In The War Lover, there is a lot of interesting and apparently accurate period detail of life at an airbase in World War II, but beyond that, don't look here for anything worth reading.

This novel would be a good example for James Bowman's classic "Honor: A History" of how Western intellectuals abandoned the concept of honor in the Twentieth Century, which is the only thing that enabled us to stop Hitler. Buzz Morrow, the "war lover" of the title, is a good leader, but there is little else to distinguish him from anyone else. His end - where he collapses when the chips are down - comes without any sense of the character which would lead you to expect this development, an inexcusable lapse in a book so long and tedious.

Unlike, say, Herman Wouk in The Caine Mutiny, Mr. Hersey lacks the grace to give his warrior the credit where credit is due. True to form with the standard issue, plodding anti-war novel, Hersey's pacifistic intellectual turns out to be a better soldier than the true warrior. This intellectual pipe dream has become a cliche in the past 90 years. One hopes that Americans will never have to discover how false this illusion is.