Noumenal Net

Take every cliche from every war movie you’ve ever seen. The blood-covered wounded guy who screams, “Kill me!” The stony faced sergeant who looks out over the battlefield and says, “War is Hell.” The men who find the corpse of an enemy and gasp, “He looks like us”.

Now add every stereotype of every U.S. soldier from every war movie you’ve ever seen. You know the ones: the stuttering hick; the selfless doctor; the patriot; the lucky one; the philosophical one; the shifty one; the crazy guy who likes to burn things.

Then blend with a generous helping of stiff dialogue. How stiff? Take this for instance:

“They were supposed to leave, but for some reason this man named Sugihara stayed for almost two weeks, handing out transit papers so that people could go to Moscow where they took the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok and then a travel steamer across the Sea of Japan to Tsuruga.”

I wouldn’t be able to put the above sentence together after half a day of running errands, yet this complicated little travel itinerary is uttered from the lips of a Jewish teen who has, just moments before, arrived in New York after fleeing the horrors of Nazi Germany. She sounds like she’s reading from a train schedule.

Finally, sprinkle liberally with lots of capital letters followed by exclamation marks, you know, like BLOOD! and the ubiquitous NO! But when you use the word war say it quietly, menacingly, one word, one sentence, one paragraph.

War.

A recipe for a disastrous novel? Well you would think so but somehow Joyce Faulkner takes these ingredients and whips them into something surprisingly complex, both engaging and perplexing, sometimes almost embarassing (BLOOD!) but always interesting. I still haven’t decided if I actually liked the damned book.

I wanted to like In the Shadow of Suribachi. I wanted it to be good. Such an important and terrible battle as Iwo-Jima deserves a thorough and well-researched treatment. And the book was indeed well researched. All the dates add up and the historical events portrayed are depicted accurately.

The narrative is well-structured, and the story unfolds at an even pace, beginning with the aftermath of a hurricane in 1935 and moving forward every couple of years, giving us glimpses into the lives of seven Amerian men whose lives will eventually converge upon the beach at Iwo-Jima.

But In the Shadow of Suribachi is more than just the sum of its parts. It’s more than just stereotypes and thorough research and sound narrative structure. Despite the cliches there is a certain unexpected quality to the novel. Characters you expect to see again, like the crazy guy who likes to burn things, never re-emerge. He might be the guy with the flamethrower, but we never know for sure. And men you didn’t meet in the opening chapters show up and suddenly take a major role in the tale. People you expect to live, die - some sooner than you think. And people you expect to die, live. Kind of like war.

Ms Faulkner really hits her stride around the book’s middle. Her prose begins to flow more naturally, her formerly wooden characters take on more depth. I think war is very difficult to portray in writing - the chaos, the extremes, the agonies, the sights, the sounds, the sensations. In her descriptions of battle Ms Faulkner occasionally stumbles into halting exposition but overall she is able to convey the misery of war with clarity and gore-soaked brilliance.

And if you think you know how the book ends - after all, we won that war - think again. We’re suddenly whisked away mid-battle, to 1970. We see one of the surviving characters driving to Kent State to fetch his daughter who’s been shot in the foot, where he meets an old war-buddy and a Vietnam veteran. Then leap forward another thirty-odd years, to a Civil War re-enactment, where things really take a turn for the surreal.

I found the final chapter especially well written and engaging. Ms Faulkner seems to have a gift for the quirky and the poignant. And in a book packed full of the unexpected, that closing chapter sure as hell trumped all previous surprises.

Flaws aside, In the Shadow of Suribachi is an earnest and compassionate book. Through her story Ms Faulkner conveys a deep interest in her subject, and she writes with empathy and sincerity of a battle that should not be forgotten, and of the men who fought it.