Alan's Reviews > Meditations in Green

taken me a while to get to this.
..was smashed about the head by this, review later..
I came to this book via Wright's Going Native which was as I called it - lush, hyper-real/surreal and trippy - and this is the same, prose that glows.

Maybe I learnt nothing new in relation to war: maybe I'm Vietnammed (or war in general) out. What happens here covers familiar ground – it combines the hallucinatory horror of Apocalypse Now (released 3 years before) with the absurdity of Catch 22 (eg all the dogs in the camp compound are killed at the whim of one “general” (i'm guessing at rank, can't remember); a “sergeant” spends all his time making a film of the war, getting the staff to recreate scenes). But nevertheless it is a powerful and stunning indictment of war and its effects, and Wright is a superb writer and moralist:

‘But what’s it like to kill somebody personally. For the reader back home. Intimate details please.’
‘..I guess I’d have to say it’s like taking a shit. You know, some are good and satisfying, some okay, some just plain messy, but one way or another, it’s always nice to get the crap out’.

The following will give an idea of how the prose flows. It is one of the more gentle passages, I've spared you the heads blown apart and the torture:

The helicopter shook and shook like a wet dog. In a moment the gears and all the bolts would come loose, trickle out the bottom in a runny metallic shit.. The engine sounded like gravel in a blender. Griffin heard a voice in his ear, ‘Waste those motherfuckers, oh goddam godamm,’ and his hands were shaking the machine gun and his arms were shaking too and Pimplechin shaking up and down beside him was helping to feed the belt into the gun that shook to the trees, the paddies, the huts, the bugs on the ground, the bugs everywhere, shaking and shaking, his own parts coming loose, sliding around like yolks in a pan, shaking the bolt out of the center of the world so a trillion agitated pieces come falling down like Christmas snow in a plastic ball in synchronised vibration until all the bugs were gone because the pilot had swung the damaged machine away to sputter along off the bone white coast above the unarmed sea.

His achievement is to make the experience so vivid you feel it in your fingertips, feel the blood coursing round you, and make you glad you’re here, in Birmingham, UK, on a bus or on the sofa, but also remembering how soldiers are out there now fighting in your name too, and how stupid and endless war is. One war after another. Maybe the only proper response for those caught up in it is to go mad like Claypool here, from Indiana, who stops speaking or responding to anything, or 'Trips' who becomes obsessed with assassinating Sergeant Anstin, even after the war, tracking him down, mistaking innocent people for him. Alternatively you could get blown away by drugs:

Each day was a tube you curled yourself into a ball and rolled through. Zip. Dark tube connected to dark tube, a tunnel to tumble down. Zip.
..He glided over time in swift hydraulic comfort. Faces were like cities, the night was a smoky black mirror, the sound of a single word filled the chamber of the universe… he rode on cockroaches to the end of color, he watched machines dissolve into gray fluid that bubbled away into the ground.

This book stands comparison to any of the great war books, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, All Quiet on the Western Front, Johnson's Tree of Smoke, or the aforementioned 'Catch 22'.