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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 20th 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])
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