It’s 1918, and the mill town of Commonwealth has shut itself off from the world as Spanish flu spreads. Armed men guard the town day and night to keep outsiders who may be contagious away. When two soldiers from a nearby base try to come in, all hell breaks loose. The main character is a teenage boy named Phillip, son of the town founder, and unable to enlist because of a leg injury. Phillip is on guard duty with his friend Graham when the first soldier arrives, […]
“That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”
On a desolate island miles from civilization, a man finds himself faced with an impossible choice. The man is Tom, a stoic, principled veteran, recently returned to Australia after serving in World War I. He’s damaged goods, carrying a heavy load of guilt for being one of the few to actually make it home from the war, alive and physically unscathed. He finds a job that speaks to his solitary tendencies as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, an isolated island about half a day’s […]
Even the Best Laid Plans Can Lead to Failure
Following my reading of Above the Dreamless Dead I decided that I wanted to read more about World War I. I studied the war relatively well in my undergraduate career, but my focus had always been about the long and short term causes and effects, the more social history view. I knew very little about the battles of the war outside the concept of trench warfare, generally speaking. A good place to start seemed Barbara Tuchman’s 1963 Pulitzer prize winning The Guns of August which […]
It’s Drafty in the Trenches, Oh
Jacques Tardi’s World War I opus, Goddamn This War!, is a hard beast to categorize, at least when using English terminology. It’s not a comic book, and for a graphic novel it’s not very novelistic. But call it what you will, it’s hard to deny its power. This is a harrowing masterpiece of one unnamed soldier’s experiences in the Great War that so wholly failed to be the war to end all wars. Things the reader won’t find in Goddamn This War! include plot and dialogue. Does […]
Turbulent Waters in Post WWI London
Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests has been getting a lot of good press since its release last month, and the praise for this novel is much deserved. It really is a masterful work. Waters creates a suspenseful and heartbreaking love story against the backdrop of post-WWI London. Its rigid moral climate and deteriorating social and economic situation contribute to an almost suffocating environment that limits opportunity for women and criminalizes unconventional sexual desires. Waters stands shoulder to shoulder with Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin in […]
Mrs. Dalloway
I’m on a quest this year to read 50 books by 50 women writers (in honor of my impending 50th birthday and #ReadWomen2014), and as I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, this felt like the right time to get to it. Mrs. Dalloway is a short novel by Woolf that covers the span of one day, marked by the hourly tolling of the bells. I would characterize it as having stream-of-consciousness narration, with the narrators switching from one to the next as they encounter […]