Tag Archives: Wars of the 20th Century

April 17, 2011 · 12:20 am

Gorazde: Difficult

           War correspondent Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Gorazde, is difficult to read. It reports on the experiences of Edin, a Bosnian Muslim, during the siege of Gorazde and describes in text and image the atrocities committed during the siege of the city and of neighboring towns, and of the violence of diplomatic decisions that favoured political expediency over human life and well-being.

As I read the book (in a single sitting, it’s entirely captivating) I asked myself what made the graphic form so effective in expressing the individual and collective suffering as compared to text-based reportage. I’m not sure I have a good answer (again, see my comments on my new-to-graphic-novels) though I suspect that it has to do with pacing. Sacco does well to slow down the pace of reading in scenes of high tension and great suffering, and in so doing required this reader to pay – uncomfortable – attention to scenes I might have more readily surged through in a text-based version. With little choice but to read snippets of sentences set against black-and-white images of intense action, the graphic version demanded my investment in each character, and in each scene that I certainly wanted to avoid reading about.

While I found Sacco entirely effective in using graphics to describe and pace his narrative, I also admired the text of the book, which did an admirable job contextualizing the conflict, while also attending to individual stories and experiences (one two-page spread, in particular, featured a compendium of “interviews” which aptly captured shared and different responses to the return of Serbs to Gorazde).

I’m not sure I appreciated Sacco’s sometime self-congratulatory digs at other reporters who “only” came to Gorazde for one or two days, while he spent considerable time in the city and made multiple trips. I appreciate the difference such reporting experiences must effect in the kind and quality of writing produced, however, I nevertheless felt these comments were less effective in attacking the West’s apparent disinterest in the suffering and death of others (as was perhaps the intent) than they were in conveying Sacco’s confidence in his reportage expertise. While many of Sacco’s self-reflexive comments approach the difficult question of why he should be able to leave and return to safety with little trouble, I do not think the text goes far enough in interviewing the reporter himself.

That said, it’s an incredibly compelling story and one, oddly I suppose, made better still by the difficulty of its reading.

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April 16, 2011 · 1:41 am

The Madman and the Butcher: Better Butcher than Madman

                               Tim Cook’s popular history, The Madman and the Butcher tackles the biographies of Canadian WWI figures, Sir Sam Hughes and Sir Arthur Curries, respectively. For those of you not up-and-up on your Canadian history, Sam Hughes worked as the Minister of Militia and MP before/during/after WW1, and Arthur Currie served first in the war as a brigadier general and eventually as the Lieutenant General of the Canadian Corp (the first Canadian, rather than a British soldier, to command a corp of Canadian soldiers).

While Cook’s history purports to be about balancing the historical record in terms of the “reputations” of each man — Hughes and Currie, have both at various points between 1914 and the present been libeled as the titular ‘madman’ and ‘butcher’ respectively — it is tilted much in favour of redeeming, and in some respects resurrecting the fading history of, Arthur Currie.

I am not at all opposed to this move on the part of Cook, I just wondered whether the book might have benefited (a great deal) from making Currie the explicit focus, rather than including the oftentimes strained and repetitive chapters on Hughes. While I appreciate the desire to set up an opposition between the two men (an opposition mirrored by Hughes’s eventual and aapparent hatred of Currie), the chapters on Currie are by far the more engaging (particularly the section on the famous libel trial).

I admired Cook’s efforts to refract growing Canadian nationalism and the successes of the Canadian corps through biography. I’m not sure the effort was successful in the case of Hughes, as his nationalist vigour to mount an impressive Canadian civilian-soldier army is tempered by his imperialist vision and the relatively minor impact he played after 1916. In the case of Currie, however, Cook does well to demonstrate the parallel struggle of Currie to establish his individual authority and the Canadian Corps’s growing recognition both home and abroad as an identifiable (and formidable) unit.

I am less impressed by the repetition in the middle section of the book, in particular, (as mentioned) with reference to Sam Hughes’s ego, lies and slander. I do think that rather than describe each battle the Canadian corps participated in, Cook might have done better to select several battles that represented key points in Currie-cum-Canada’s development, rather than the (sometimes exhausting) description of each movement of artillery.

The last third of the book that deals with the libel trial is engaging and engrossing, and does a terrific job of getting at Cook’s purported intent of addressing the “war of reputations.” Again, this “war” has nothing to do with Hughes, and everything to do with Currie. Hence, a book that is far better at dealing with the butcher, than the madman.

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April 11, 2011 · 4:36 pm

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold: Death be Cause

       A good spy novel ought to have double agents, sacrificial women, and neat fight scenes. John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold has these elements. It’s a really good read: well paced, brilliantly plotted, and smooth in the necessary transitions in narrative focalization that allow the reader access to pieces of information, but not quite enough (for me at least) to piece together the mystery before le Carre is ready to have it all out.

The novel grapples with questions of whether individual lives are worth sacrificing for the sake of the larger good, and then explodes this (somewhat banal) moral question by tackling whether there is such a thing as a “larger good” at all. These questions might sound overwrought, but the novel does a remarkable job of weaving these ideas into character and plot in such a way as to not read as clunky or melodramatic (with the one notable exception of Leamas’s and Liz’s conversation in the car).

A great cold war novel in its descriptions of tension along the borders and in its attention to the similarities between the two powers in both ideology and method. A great spy novel for its emphasis on plot, but with a suitable level of character development that allows the conclusion to by poignant and affecting.

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March 10, 2011 · 10:03 pm

Paris 1919: Excellent

               Even if I wasn’t predisposed to an enjoyment of WWI history, I suspect I’d have enjoyed Margaret MacMillian’s (epic 500 page) account of the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles in Paris 1919. Elegant sentences and a keen sense of characterization make this history intensely readable. A decision to withhold judgment on the particular historical characters lends it credibility, in that no one person or country is blamed; rather, the combined effect of a complicated and contingent set of treaties, weak characters (either too ambitious or too reticent), illnesses, and miscommunications, resulted in a treaty that, as MacMillan argues, cannot on its own be blamed for anything (re: not for WWII), but must be recognized in historical hindsight (and by many at the time) as an abject failure in a project of promoting peace.

I particularly enjoyed the characterization of the members of the Supreme Council (aptly named, I suppose): Wilson, Clemenceau, Orlando and Lloyd George. Each received ample introduction, which allowed the later discussion of their mistakes, and subsequent political downfalls, to read as poignant. The measured attention to the contradictory enforcement of “self-determination” as dependent on political and economic expedients for those with political power, and the arrogance and self-righteousness of the policy makers, came with an appropriate connection to circumstances in the present that resonated, without badgering.

The organization of the book is excellent. Characters, countries and their different aims and outcomes, geographic determinations and overlaps, unfold according to geography, but also read as seamlessly plotted, such that a subsequent chapter relies on necessary information introduced in a former. That said, there are a few occasions where I wondered whether an editor might have missed a line where information is given twice — perhaps a later section written independently without regard for the chapter that came earlier? or perhaps a purposeful reminder to the reader of what appears to be a rather insignificant point? I’m not sure, and it probably doesn’t matter, as these infrequent repetitions take nothing away from the well crafted plot.

If you’re at all interested in imperialism, border-making, diplomacy, or Europe in the inter-war period I cannot recommend this book enough. Should you find European history to be the least engaging, you will be – without overstatement, I think – riveted at many points by this account. Perchance you dislike history books, Europeans, witty asides, and sarcastic comments about historical attire and comportment, you best look elsewhere.

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