The First World War I is strongly identified with the poetry of the trenches, though prose memoirs and fictions by combatants are also acknowledged. But how is the Second World War reflected in fiction? French and German literature have produced works that have a claim to be the representation of a national experience of war – Grass’s The Tin Drum and Tournier’s The Erl King (also translated, and filmed, as The Ogre). But with one possible exception, literatures written in English have not done likewise, and the best evocations of the war are varied in genre.
This course begins with the exception, Joseph Heller’s famous Catch-22 (1961), concerning a fictional USAAF squadron flying missions in the Mediterranean 1942-44. Satirical, autobiographical, tragicomic, and often bitter, despite a relatively upbeat ending, the titular double-bind has become an enduring phrase, often used lightly, but for most of Heller’s characters it is a death sentence.
The comedic note continues in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61), following the misadventures of Guy Crouchback in Dakar, Crete, Yugoslavia, and a messy Home Front. At times it flirts with caricature, as with Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, and on the surface treats war as a hopeless muddle about which one has to laugh – the alternative being screaming; and beneath the comedy is a deepening ache of irony and loss.
The dominant note of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’, conversely, is tragedy, coming to bitter fruition in the final volume, A Division of the Spoils (1975) – the Partition of India in 1947, made inevitable by the war, and at once a thieves’ carve-up of loot and the trisection of a subcontinent spoiled, like meat, by its imperial overlords.
The course ends with two memorable thrillers, each dealing with something important others have neglected. Alastair Maclean had served on the Murmansk convoys, and his debut novel, HMS Ulysses (1955), draws on autobiography to ask hard questions about the calculus of warfare. And Anthony Price’s The ’44 Vintage (1978) knows that the Cold War started before World War II ended, and examines their troubling overlap.
