Customer Reviews

War Story

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4 star:		(1)
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An excellent book which is sadly out of print. The story and characters met here also appear in Goshawk Squadron and Hornets Nest. This book gives a real feel of what it must have been like to fly and fight in the air in World War One. Like many of Derek Robinsons books it contains a combination of humour and horror. The relatively comfortable lives of the pilots on the ground is thrown into stark relief with the danger and discomfort of their lives in the air. I can highly recommend it

War Story is the first in a trilogy of sorts. It begins the saga of Hornet Squadron in World War One (it is continued in Piece of Cake and A Good Clean Fight which take place during World War Two (by the same author)). All three books are character focused rather than the usual war fiction standard of being action based - though the dogfighting scenes are incredibly well done. Take All Quiet on the Western front, put the action in Airplanes, and add excellent, and sometimes hilarious, dialog, and you have War Story.

WAR STORY is Derek Robinson's masterpiece. It is better than PIECE OF CAKE, which was filmed in 1988 for LWT, and it is better than GOSHAWK SQUADRON, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1971. It is simply an excellent novel every bit the equal of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT or CATCH-22.

Unlike Robinson's other wartime aviation novels, this one gives us a single character to focus most of our attention on. Paxton is a young pilot, fresh from flight school, who thinks that the First World War is the greatest thing to ever happen to the world. He is longing for the chance to sink his teeth into the enemy and come home a hero. Instead he makes a mess of his very first mission -- to lead six replacement planes across the channel -- and becomes an air-gunner, paired with a cynical veteran pilot. He witnesses the Battle of the Somme, which he thinks is a great opportunity for the British cavalry to show their stuff. He meets a rich English girl who throws extravagant parties for the soldiers, and he boasts to her about the Germans he's killed.

Watching him butt heads with the more experienced pilots is perhaps the major conflict of the book, and a great well of black comedy. Paxton simply doesn't understand why no one else seems to be having a good time. He even argues with his pilot in midair. But no one can remain unchanged forever, which Paxton discovers by the end of the book.

The rest of Hornet Squadron is not left out. We are introduced to Kellaway -- who will reappear in PIECE OF CAKE and A GOOD CLEAN FIGHT in the next war; Cleve-Cutler, the new commanding officer who fortifies his pilots with Hornet's Sting, a potent mix of every type of booze imaginable; and Corporal Lacey, a public school-educated clerk, who tells us, "It takes no great skill to die. No skill at all, in fact. Thoroughly unqualified people do it all the time."

Until Robinson began writing, fiction of this sort was limited to the adventures of Biggles, hero of boy's-own pulp magazines. GOSHAWK SQUADRON changed that, and thank heaven. WAR STORY, by the end, is more moving and more focused than Robinson's other novels. It is funny and tragic in equal measure. Read it.

In War Story, Derek Robinson begins his fictionalized account of "Hornet" Squadron in the British Royal Flying Corps (RFC). Although War Story was written after several of Robinson's other novels depicting "Hornet" squadron, it essentially serves as a "prequel" that explains the background behind the unit and at least one key follow-on character. The book is set in June 1916, just as the British are getting ready for the Battle of the Somme, and the squadron is equipped with the unusual FE2b "push-pull" aircraft. There is much less aerial combat in this book compared to Robinson's other books, and the focus is more heavily on character development within the squadron. As usual in his style, Robinson introduces the reader to a host of different personality types resident in a typical fighter squadron. Overall, War Story is an excellent novel of life in a First World War fighter squadron and the way that war affects individuals differently.

The main protagonist in War Story is the not very likeable Lieutenant Oliver Paxton. This character reminds me somewhat of the character "Goodrich" in James Webb's Vietnam novel Fields of Fire; like Goodrich, Paxton encounters great difficulty in bonding with other members of his unit and is regarded as foolish and/or incompetent. Yet like Goodrich, Paxton does experience personal growth through the "school of hard knocks" and by the end of the novel, he has involved into a totally different person. Other major characters include the no-nonsense squadron commander Hugh Cleve-Cutler, the unflappable squadron adjutant Major Brazier (a former infantry lieutenant colonel demoted for shooting several of his troops who ran away under fire), and O'Neill, Paxton's tormenter and copilot. Kellaway, who goes on to be the squadron adjutant in Robinson's Second World War novels "Piece of Cake" and "A Good Clean Fight," is introduced as an accident-prone young replacement. The relationships in the squadron may appear a bit odd or overly cruel at times, particularly in the brusque manner that replacements are treated, but this is probably quite accurate. Of course, one by one, "Hornet" squadron is shorn of is veteran and rookie pilots, leaving only a handful alive.

War Story is not quite as cynical as some of Robinson's other novels, but he does hammer home the lack of any romanticism in the air war. Even the most idealistic pilots are rapidly worn down by fatigue, stress and the realization that their number is bound to come up in the near future. While not quite as good as Goshawk Squadron or Piece of Cake, War Story is still a very good depiction of squadron life in the First World War.

For mine this is the best of Derek Robinson's WW1 trilogy, but I am a huge fan of all his novels. War Story is totally authentic, the characters (in particular Paxton, O'Neill, and Lacey, plus Judith Kent Haffner) as usual are brilliant creations, and the historical background is very well researched. The humour is unsurpassed. As always, a profound sadness accompanies the ending and creates a sense of nostalgia which makes me want to start the story all over again. 10/10.

In 1916 the main character, Oliver Paxton, a very young and inexperienced officer pilot, ferries a plane to France in order to join Hornet Squadron. Paxton hopes to accumulate feats of glory and has an "outsider's" view of the war, typical of the man who has not seen a comrade die before his eyes. His cavalier attitudes make him an outcast in an environment where teamwork and belonging count for a lot to a man's sanity. Gradually, through several funny and tragic events, Paxton replaces his do or die for England attitude with a more realistic view of the futility of war, specially World War I.

War Story is funny in the same way Catch 22 is funny, it contains hilarious dialogue and absurd situations only possible with a bunch of well educated men who are resigned and almost certain of their impending and sudden flaming death and are constantly fighting their desire to flee the war and to survive but do their daily duty as if nothing else mattered. The tragedy is that the funnyness is all withing the real tragedy of a war few who were fighting it understood at all. Robinson is a master at the art of writing war novels. I fully recommend this book. I do wish the rest of the trilogy will be reprinted again.

If at times I have been a little harsh on Derek Robinson in my reviews, it's only because I know what he can do with a typewriter when he wants to. But in WAR STORY he has not only written an outstanding novel, he has written one of the great war novels and one of the all-time great novels about flying. If PIECE OF CAKE was his magnum opus, then this is his masterpiece. It's just that good.

WAR STORY is the tale of Oliver Paxton, an 18 year-old lieutenant just out of flight school and on his way into the maelstrom of World War One. Paxton is by no means your typical war-book hero. He's pompous, egocentric, shallow, snobbish, self-aggrandizing, bloodthirsty, and only dubiously competent as a pilot. This is clearly established on the very first page, when he leads a flight of five aircraft from England to France, and manages to lose four of them en route. Arriving at Hornet Squadron in Amiens he rapidly makes enemies with his slobbish Australian roomate O'Neil -- who of course ends up flying with him -- and, well, everyone in the squadron. "Everyone" is quite a cast of characters, because the average life expectancy of a pilot in the British Royal Flying Corps is three weeks, a fact never forgotten by its pitiless commander, Cleve-Cutler, "whose face was much improved by flying into a barn" and its even more ruthless adjudant, Brazier, who thinks nothing of shooting his own men for cowardice. Paxton believes in himself, however, and thus soon attracts the attentions of a rich and beautiful woman named Judith, who is violently aroused by his slightly embellished tales of battle in the sky, and promises him all sort of favors when he scores his first kill. The opportunity for that is fast approaching, because the British are planning a huge offensive on the Somme, designed to end the war by Christmas -- or wipe out the British Army in trying.

WAR STORY is classic Derek Robinson. That is to say, it shows a marvelous, intimate understanding not merely of aircraft and aerial combat, but of the mentality of combat pilots, who combine witless immaturity with unquenchable blood-thirst and a taste for collegiate-style pranks and glib conversation. American readers will be both amused and appalled by the slick shallowness of the protagonists, which is only occasionally interrupted by moments of genuine feeling -- such as the homosexual crush one ace pilot has on another, the diagnosis of fatal cancer in a young war hero, or the inability of the slobbish, bullying O'Neill to get over the death of his best friend. Likewise, Robinson's relentless cynicism -- sometimes horrifying, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious -- can be both off-putting and irresistably attractive: he follows his traditional pattern of refusing to romanticize the "knights of the air" but instead paints quick, savage portraits of young men so steeled in the traditions of their boarding schools and class system that they regard the war as a sort of gigantic cricket tournmanent, played to the death.

Robinson has written many books, but WAR STORY might be his best. The prose is crisp and arresting, managing to sum up complex characters in a few pages and sometimes in just a few sentences, and his experience as a pilot lend an authenticity to the flying sequences that's hard to match elsewhere. He "gets" pilots in the same way he "gets" the culture of the Royal Flying Corps. His wit is skewering, and his pitiless treatment of his characters -- essentially a "no one is safe" policy -- makes you genuinely wonder who is going to live to the next chapter. And unlike PIECE OF CAKE, whose sole flaw was that it tended to drag at times over its massive 600 page length, WAR STORY comes in at a comparatively trim 330 pages. If you've never read any Derek Robinson, this is definitely as good a place as any to start.