A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

-      Okay, this review contains legitimate spoilers, so if you’d rather not know the very few plot-details of the book, then stop reading now. Forever. You will never read anything ever again.

    If I’ve discovered anything from my past two-year long quest to read loads of famous books, it’s that I have a taste for 20^th century cynical American literature. Kurt Vonnegut obviously takes the biscuit, while J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye holds a particular place in my heart, so you’d think that one of the biggest-named American writers of all time, Ernest Hemingway, would be right up my street. 

This is not the case, sadly.

A Farewell to Arms is a novel about an American officer serving in the Italian army during the First World War. He meets an English nurse with whom he falls in love, gets wounded in battle on the Austrian Front, spends many chapters convalescing under the watchful gaze of his simpering lover, drinks his way through what seems like Italy’s entire supply of alcoholic beverages, goes back to the front and decides he doesn’t like it, deserts after a disastrous retreat and hooks up with his girl again, who’s pregnant by this point, they run away to Switzerland and then he watches as she dies from complications of childbirth. That is the plot, and on one level it’s quite a slow, tedious story in which nothing really happens – but on another level you could say that it’s a realistic, gritty piece of writing which pays close attention to the minutiae of human behaviour. It’s just rather dull, is all.

Hemingway is famous for his writing abilities. Sometimes he supplies vivid descriptions of physical locations, going to town on the smallest of incidental details, packing them into sentences and being daringly Spartan with his commas. These were the bits I almost liked. He releases information very gradually, so the character of his protagonist, when and where in the world the story takes place, and the actual shape of the plot, are all revealed at a stuttering, arthritic pace. Again I could almost forgive him for this, as it feels like he’s attempting a degree of immersion by limiting our involvement in the story with this gradual supply of information. Who cares if the reader gets bored from this lack of engagement with the characters or events described? Who cares if the writing style is clunky and too awkward to be enjoyed? As long as he makes up for it when it counts – say, with the characters and dialogue and scenes that pack an emotional punch. He could well make up for it then.

Unfortunately, Hemingway gives us the cold ultra-vivid description scenes only sparingly; much of the novel is padded out with dialogue scenes, in which Hemingway’s famous close attention to physical detail gets completely forgotten in favour of unadulterated conversation. Just conversation, and not even interesting ones at that. It basically consists of the protagonist (whose name is of such little importance I can’t even remember it having just finished the book) and another character sawpping short snatches of dialogue over entire pages by talking about nothing much at all – idle chit-chat, basically. It’s dull, repetitive, and feels like it’s just padding out a novel which could stand to be a lot shorter (and it’s not even that long as it is). Imagine being forced to listen in to a conversation between a couple of rather dull people who have nothing specific to talk about, in a silent room with nothing else to distract you and no way for you to join in. That's like a Hemingway book.

The numerous sections which feature the English nurse love-interest character (I think she was called Catherine Barkley, or something along those lines) are slow, dull, and make me pity the both of them – or at least they would if I could actually care two hoots for either character. Catherine is a little irritating, but she seems almost interesting compared to the protagonist, a grey blob with no personality whatsoever. He just bumbles around, talks inanely with other people in which he occasionally voices a slightly sceptical thought, and otherwise just has a relatively comfortable middle-class émigré-esque existence in which he occasionally mentions the name of the particular type of continental beverage he finds to drink. I don’t dislike him, but I can’t for the life of me think of any reason I’d have for wanting to be around him. Even though they have to flee from the war, it doesn’t stop the two of them from having a really bloody comfortable time in Switzerland. Somehow they have an unending supply of money to live on, so the horrors of the war, the sacrifice of leaving the army, entering the country illegally, have no real drawbacks. Why on Earth didn’t he do it sooner, I wonder. The last chapters are basically just recounting what a rather pleasant holiday they have, and it’s just a shame it’s all marred by her tragic death at the end. But at least they had whole months to fool around in glorified idleness on a Swiss holiday while the war carries on somewhere far, far away and they don't really plan on ever leaving their Alpine island. It’s the story of a couple of people who are luckier than they have any right to be, and to me that doesn’t make a good story.

The problem is that Hemingway has tried to write a novel by stripping it of any and all entertainment value or anything to say. Stuff just happens, and occasionally we get a section of stream-of-consciousness that reads like crude prose-poetry, but those are so diluted in the rest of the book that they’re barely worth mentioning. One of the best bits is a brief lump of writing where he’s stowed-away on a train and is considering that he’s deserting the army, but that lasted a momentous two and a half pages. I wanted to care, but I couldn’t. Ernest Hemingway just doesn’t do it for me. If you want a decent cynical post-war American writer, then try someone further down the line - Vonnegut or Salinger, who have both produced books significantly better than this one. Of Hemingway's other most noteworthy works, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, I have nothing yet to say, for I have read neither. Maybe I will one day, as I'm almost tempted to give this guy just one more chance.

Biblingway

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Guild Publishing: Thetford. (1978 [First Published 1929])

The Odyssey, by Homer

The Odyssey, that most memorable ‘second work of western literature’. Like The Iliad, it is a Greek epic ascribed to the semi-legendary poet Homer, and forms a sequel to that long and violent rumination on the Trojan War. I reviewed The Iliad in June earlier this year, and found it a little hard-going – but recently I think that this might be due, at least in part, to my particular choice of translation, because for The Odyssey I went for that tried-and-beloved brand: Penguin Classics, and found it considerably more to my taste (I apologise for plugging, but I feel in this case it needs to be mentioned).

          The story of The Odyssey, and indeed the title, is all down to the main hero Odysseus, a strategist and secondary character from The Iliad who, at some point between these two epics, is fundamental in finally bringing the Trojan War to an end in victory for the Achaeans by using a giant wooden horse. When The Odyssey begins, ten years have passed since the war ended and all the surviving Achaean leaders have made their way back to their native kingdoms, but Odysseus is missing in action; presumed dead, or at least very, very lost. On his home island realm of Ithaca, Odysseus’ wife Penelope and their son Telemachus find their home invaded by a horde of men seeking to win Penelope’s hand in marriage, and thereby claim Odysseus’ property, status and wealth; under the thin veneer of being ‘guests’, these Suitors spend their time eating, plotting and partying under Odysseus’ roof, while young Telemachus watches in frustration as his inheritance is gobbled up by these scumbags. What he really needs is for his father to come back home right about now, and put these Suitors in their place; but what the hell has actually happened to him?

          While Telemachus spends the first few chapters journeying Achaea and chatting with some familiar faces from The Iliad – Nestor of Pylos, and Menelaus of Sparta, with Queen Helen restored to his side – it transpires that Odysseus has been, essentially, held hostage on a remote island by the Nymph Calypso for the past seven years, having to endure a tough regime of nightly love-making with a goddess. Having finally persuaded Calypso to let him go with a little divine help, Odysseus can once again resume his journey homewards, chatting with a helpful king and recalling the eventful voyage that led to his delay, before finally arriving back in Ithaca and facing the Suitors who have invaded his home, plotted against his son, and courted his wife in his absence.

          Now to talk about translations. This Penguin edition has toned down the verse-format, instead presenting the book as more of a novel than a poem, with sentences and paragraphs rather than a rigid line-format. It still adheres to the line-numbering structure of an epic poem, but it feels friendlier on the eyes than Fitzgerald’s Oxford edition of The Iliad that I subjected myself to. Meanwhile the translation of the text itself feels more creative, as though Rieu’s Penguin edition has been liberally treated to make the poem not only work in modern English, but to also revel in it. Rather than the flat, quite literal word-for-word approach that made my experience with The Iliad such a bore, this particular translation of The Odyssey feels as though it’s meant to be enjoyed, which it most certainly was. The characters felt like proper characters, the action actually appeared in my mind’s eye as I read it, and I was fully engaged with the story. Seriously, I was curious about what would happen next. I know first-hand how much licence the translator has taken with the text, as I myself have actually been exposed to small sections of the original Greek. It’s a devilish business, having to make the necessary compromises between an ancient epic and a modern novel, but I praise Rieu for his stylistic choices, as he has brought this ancient tale into a fully accessible and enjoyable format that kept me awake long into the night. 

Conceivably I would actually enjoy The Iliad, and have more praises to dump upon it, were I to seek out the Penguin translation of that particular Homeric epic, although I still stand by some of my previous criticisms with regards to it – criticisms that I am glad The Odyssey does not warrant. Whereas The Iliad was simply a collection of fight-scenes and godly dialogues fixed around a certain place and time, involving hundreds of relatively meaningless minor characters whose only purpose in the story is to die horribly at the hands of somebody else, The Odyssey is a story about homecoming, whose characters are generally more vivid, whose plot-progressions are a great deal more noteworthy and varied, and whose scenes of action and violence are much more sparse, and handled much more interestingly. Everything is leading up to the great confrontation at the end between Odysseus and the Suitors, but the numerous diversions the book ambles through in order to get there are all the stuff of excellence. Odysseus’ arrival in the land of the Phaeacians, and the recounting of his adventures prior to becoming Calypso’s prisoner is all the stuff of legend (quite literally) – it’s here we find all of the most famous stories from The Odyssey, the Lotus-Eaters, the run-in with the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe, the voyage to the Underworld and back again, and the sea-monsters Scylla and Charybdis. None of these fantastical events happen in real-time, but are told by Odysseus to King Alcinous of the Phaeacians; they’re not strictly part of the story itself, but are instead just a cool diversion from the main plot.

Because the story of The Odyssey is not of the journey, as such, or of the fantastical trials that the protagonist has to face, but rather it is a tale about the momentous homecoming of a hero after a two-decade long absence. A total of half of this epic takes place after Odysseus arrives back in his homeland of Ithaca, and the trial of reclaiming his home and rescuing his family from the Suitors forms the backbone of the plot; the famous stories of the Sirens and the Cyclops are essentially just character-development. Really, when people refer to an ‘odyssey’, they should be talking of an arrival home after a long voyage, not the journey itself.

In terms of characters, Odysseus naturally is the main protagonist – but not the sole one. Telemachus, his son, plays a prominent role throughout the epic, and for the first few chapters (or books) he serves as the main character, searching for word of his father in a sort of ‘coming-of-age’ sub-plot to Odysseus’ homecoming story. One of the great moments of this epic is the belated reunion of father and son – Odysseus has been gone for twenty years, meaning he last saw Telemachus when the lad was an infant – and this pairing, of a young hero and a veteran, results in an awesome partnership who then have to work together to defeat the Suitors, first as secret allies when they sneak Odysseus in under the Suitors’ radar, and then fighting shoulder-to-shoulder when the shit finally hits the fan.

Of the other characters in the tale, Penelope – Odysseus’ estranged wife – is memorable and compelling, trapped by her circumstances but being wily enough to parry the advances of the Suitors. The Suitors themselves are a disreputable bunch of arseholes, flocking to Odysseus’ home like flies to a carcass and hounding his family for their own benefit and amusement. There is no moral ambiguity as in The Iliad; these people are the villains of the tale, and the wrath of Odysseus at the climax is well and truly deserved. The gods, meanwhile, are an ever-present force as they were in The Iliad, but here the limelight is taken by one particular god – or goddess to be specific. Athena is one of the main driving-forces behind the plot, offering a helping hand and sound advice to each of the main characters at various points throughout - a much needed ally, especially when her uncle Poseidon is all too keen to make life difficult for everyone.

So there we have it; The Odyssey is actually a really good book – at least if you get a friendly translation. While The Iliad is a generally sombre reflection on the horrors of war, detailing unending violence and the cruelty of humanity, this critically-acclaimed sequel is a heroic romp across the Bronze Age Mediterranean, with men fighting against all obstacles to reach that treasured goal: home and family. Again, I must stress the importance of which ‘version’ you decide to read, as it could make or break your opinion on the work itself. I hate to plug any publisher over another, but I feel compelled to say I’ve found that the Penguin Classics translation is enjoyable and accessible to a broad readership - and there is no readership more broad than myself. If you want something less obviously geared towards entertainment, and more word-for-word straight from the original Greek, then there will be a good number of alternatives to choose from, or you could try it in the full Homeric. I wouldn’t, personally.

The Biblodyssey

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by E.V. Rieu. Revised Edition. Penguin: St. Ives. (1991 [First Published 1946])