THE FARTHER SHORE

"Sitting on that rooftop, with all the heat and darkness, the city smelled like death. Enveloped by the stench, the thought of setting sail alone in this world horrified me. I shifted further back from the edge."

—page 8, The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck

I just finished The Farther Shore. It is the winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the Winter 2007 Read This! selection of the Litblog Co-op. And rightly so.

This war novel, which is also an anti-war novel, is refreshingly literary and uncinematic. The battle scenes are related in sparse language and imagery—enough to know what is going on, and violent in their own right, but without the Technicolor trappings that accompany most current war fiction. The carnage is still gritty, real, and horrible. Perhaps it is even moreso, since the reader's imagination is needed to fill in the gaps, and we all have images to draw upon: CNN, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, HBO, et cetera.

---

"Outside, the world was drab and muddy. We were living in what seemed to be a perpetual twilight. The days and nights bled together, and I rarely knew on waking from some bad dream what time it was."
—page 127, The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck

"Into the youth's eyes there came a look that one can see in the orbs of a jaded horse. His neck was quivering with nervous weakness and the muscles of his arms felt numb and bloodless. His hands, too, seemed large and awkward as if he was wearing invisible mittens. And there was a great uncertainty about his knee joints."
—page 58, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

We don't need all of the details fleshed out for us. Eck isn't writing in order to babysit us, or even to entertain us. He is writing in order to tell a story. He uses his own experience as a soldier of the US Army's 10th Mountain Light Infantry Division in Somalia and Haiti to give the story an air of authenticity. Around this skeletal knowledge he builds a tale of the hellishness of (modern) warfare.

Six soldiers of the 10th Mountain are in the middle of an unnamed city—most likely Mogadishu—and helping target bombing raids from their position atop one of the buildings in the city's core. A couple of kids accidentally stumble upon their location and are killed out of fear. The six soldiers attempt to get to their pickup point, but they cannot call into headquarters because the radio goes dead. They wait at their pickup point, where helicopters eventually come for them, but local militias are also in wait. Two of the six leave on one of the helicopters, one of the helicopters is destroyed in small arms fire, and the remaining four are left to fend for themselves in a hostile city.

All of the residents of the city know that the US soldiers killed the two youth and local warlords and gangs are looking to kill them in retaliation. What follows is infighting amongst the four soldiers, battles, trying to find friendly residents of the city while trying to use them to escape, surviving out in the Somali "wilderness" with little or no rations, friendly fire, and eventual reunion. But the costs of all this are the deaths of characters that we barely got to know, young men barely out of their teens who are fighting in a war that they do not understand.

The novel that I kept thinking of while reading The Farther Shore was Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. The campaigns may be different, but the horror of war depicted is not. The fear and cowardice and anxiety of the youth of The Red Badge of Courage is echoed in Joshua Stantz of The Farther Shore. The pictures "painted" by both novels—like the Desastres de la guerra series of etchings made by Goya—are unflinching and truthful in their reality. The soldiers are petty and ugly at times, brave and kind to one another at times, and always fully human. They are full of sin and full of virtue, often within the same moments. They are "just doing their jobs" and they make mistakes. And these mistakes often cost the lives of innocents or of those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

---

"He was awakened by the muffled echo of gunfire. He stretched his arm out and pressed the button on the lamp, but the bulb didn't light up...Barbed wire and chevaux-de-frise had been placed between the side wall of the movie theater and the half-destroyed café on the corner. The front line appeared to be located there. He could not continue his investigation because the whistle of a bullet passing by that missed his head by just a few centimeters forced him to step back."
—page 45, State of Siege by Juan Goytisolo

"I saw them ahead of me, running fast. People were crossing the street between us and I began to think I might lose them. I fired my weapon into the air and people scattered back behind walls and into doorways. Santiago and Zeller turned and slowed for me."
—page 95, The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck

I was also reminded of Juan Goytisolo's State of Siege. The urban warfare of the city in The Farther Shore and of Sarajevo in State of Siege adds to the confusion, claustrophobia, and xenophobia of the characters. Everyone is a potential enemy, even those one is supposed to trust, even one's self. This is truly survival of the fittest. One wrong move and a bullet tears through your neck. The tension is unbearable for not only the protagonist, but also the reader.

I can smell the burning corpses after a truck explodes. I can hear the packs of feral dogs that roam the streets in the dark of night, the electrical power out, looking for something to eat. I can sense the liberation that either escape or death brings. One no longer needs to endure, although there will be nightmares and flashbacks, at least if one escapes alive. Fortunately, for me, I can close the pages and shelve the book.

But perhaps there will nightmares for me as well.