That's what I was going to write to start off the last entry, I can remember it now. I finished off 'Goshawk Squadron', by Derek Robinson, which was in the pack of war books V got me for my birthday (yes, a while ago now, but I am working my way slowly through them). Is a Booker Prize nominated book, from 1971, about three months in the life of a fighter squadron of the British Royal Flying Corps in 1918.
The book takes it time to get going, from training in the back of the line to reconnaisance over the front, to full scale battles, but it is a great read, reinforcing the futility of the Western Front, whether in the trenches or in the air, and shows the waste of lives during the war. Some characters you get to know, some just arrive and die almost immediately in accidents or in combat, the uselessness of and cynicism towards the mission grows thicker and thicker. Possibly thirty characters come and go through the course of the book, it just makes you want to cry. And then you remember that the British lost 60,000 casualties the first hour of the Somme. Overwhelming to think of the big picture. A great book.
But depressing. And coming almost straight on top of that Incendiary book, which has seared in my head already an Arsenal Chelsea game being bombed, and the aftermath - not so much a work of crime or terrorism fiction as an alternate history, along the lines of Robert Harris' Fatherland (also a first book, if I remember correctly) - coming almost straight on top of me reading that, hmm.
With my faint head and nausea yesterday, can reading of horror and such make you ill? Can't have helped, surely...
Paul
The book takes it time to get going, from training in the back of the line to reconnaisance over the front, to full scale battles, but it is a great read, reinforcing the futility of the Western Front, whether in the trenches or in the air, and shows the waste of lives during the war. Some characters you get to know, some just arrive and die almost immediately in accidents or in combat, the uselessness of and cynicism towards the mission grows thicker and thicker. Possibly thirty characters come and go through the course of the book, it just makes you want to cry. And then you remember that the British lost 60,000 casualties the first hour of the Somme. Overwhelming to think of the big picture. A great book.
But depressing. And coming almost straight on top of that Incendiary book, which has seared in my head already an Arsenal Chelsea game being bombed, and the aftermath - not so much a work of crime or terrorism fiction as an alternate history, along the lines of Robert Harris' Fatherland (also a first book, if I remember correctly) - coming almost straight on top of me reading that, hmm.
With my faint head and nausea yesterday, can reading of horror and such make you ill? Can't have helped, surely...
Paul
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