B6
B Jonathan Yardley
n 2007, toward the end of his seven months’ service in Afghanistan, Patrick Hennessey of the British Grenadier Guards celebrated his 25th birthday and his promotion from lieutenant to captain. From home he received “the sheer twelve-year-old joy of birthday parcels and cards and goodies galore,” and from his platoon “the gentle ribbing of the boys that I might be the youngest captain in the army, but I’m no longer ‘young.’ ”
Bullets, books and boredom I
THE JUNIOR OFFICERS’ READING CLUB Killing Time and Fighting Wars By Patrick Hennessey Riverhead. 310 pp. Paperback, $16
itself can bring home the true nature of warfare. But it certainly conveys “the way the further you got into the war, into the jungle, into the heart of darkness, the more the scales of normality fell away.” It takes the readers into a place where “normal parameters were meaningless, rules didn’t exist, time bent, and only the heat and exhaustion were real enough to remind you that this wasn’t a dream sequence.” The two books from which it most directly draws inspiration are Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” (1977), the classic account (by a noncombatant) of the Vietnam War, and Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead” (2003), about the second Iraq campaign, and it deserves to be ranked with both of them. It takes a bit of getting used to, at least for this much older reader who suffers from exceedingly limited familiarity with heavy metal and rap, British youth slang and military acronyms (fortunately a glossary is supplied). Almost all readers will need some time to adjust to Hennessey’s prose, which is quirky, unconventional, at times stream of consciousness, at others obscure. But be patient and make the effort. It’s worth it. Hennessey was 18 years old, wrapping things
That, if anything, is an understatement. Early in his Afghanistan posting he had recalled “the vivid imagery of the First World war poets,” in particular Siegfried Sassoon’s powerful “Suicide in the Trenches” and its “vituperative lines” to which his fellow soldiers “nodded approvingly when I managed to drag them up from memory —‘You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by / Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go.’” In significant measure, “The Junior Officers’ Reading Club,” first published last year in England when Hennessey was 27, is intended to bring down “the wall that’s been quietly built between those of us who are here [in Afghanistan] and have lived these things and everybody else, no matter how close to us they previously were.” That reflection comes after a satellite-phone conversation with Jenny Dean, “my amazing girlfriend,” that left him “not sure how a phone conversation can go so quickly from sexy whisperings and longing for clean sheets and sturdy double beds to tearful recriminations and complete lack of understanding,” but deepened his awareness of the unbridgeable gulf between soldiers at war and civilians back home. “The Junior Officers’ Reading Club” isn’t going to eliminate that misunderstanding, even for those who read it closely and take its lessons to heart, because nothing except the experience
up at Oxford in 2001, when he applied for officer training school. He was part of a wave of post-9/11 enlistments, but his motives had less to do with patriotism or a desire to serve than with “boredom with everything else.” Indeed, boredom is a theme that runs throughout “The Junior Officers’ Reading Club,” as summarized when Hennessey and his unit arrive in Afghanistan in March 2007: “I was bored. As bored as I’d been when I decided to join theArmy, as bored as I’d been on public duties, guarding royal palaces while friends were guarding convoys in Iraq, as bored as I’d been once we got to Iraq and found ourselves fighting the Senior Major more than Saddam. Stone-throwing, chain-smoking, soldier-purging bored.”
Boredom is of course a salient if not dominant
fact of military life, evidence of which can be found in everything from “Goodbye to All That” to “Mister Roberts” to “From Here to Eternity” to “Catch-22,” but Hennessey puts an especially vivid spin on it, if anything about boredom can be said to be vivid. The reading club referred to had been formed “in the heat of the southern Iraqi desert” by junior officers seeking “quick half-hour escapes from the oppressive heat and boredom routine,” members of “a newly busy Army, a post-9/11 Army of graduates and wise-arse Thatcherite kids up to their elbows in the Middle East.” It wasn’t a reading club in the received sense of the term — white wine and cucumber sandwiches most definitely were not served — but a way to keep boredom under control and to discover, in novels of wildly varying quality, “a sense of the surreal, an acute sense of the slightly
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mad,” or, in a phrase, the world of war. It wasn’t until Hennessey got to Afghanistan
that he found that world, which in truth is what he had been seeking all the time: “the contact battle that ramps the heartbeat up so high and pumps adrenalin and euphoria through the veins in such a heady rapid mix . . . the ultimate affirmation of being alive.”That’s strong stuff, and readers of a pacifist inclination aren’t going to like it, but it gets to a truth about the human mind and heart. John Hersey called a now-forgotten novel of his “The War Lover” (1959), and its portrait of a man who lived for and reveled in combat touches the same themes as Hennessey does. “I suddenly know that I hate this and love it at the same time because I can already feel both how glad I will be when it is over and how much I will miss it,” he writes. “How difficult to convey to anyone that matters something which they will never understand, and how little anything else will ever matter.” And, a few pages later: “I would probably rather be anywhere in the world right now other than here, but if I was anywhere else in the world I would just want to be back here.” Some may be tempted to take this as posturing, but the temptation must be resisted. It’s an honest acknowledgment of the darkness within us, of the unwelcome emotions that combat can bring about. “Eight dead Taliban today so we celebrate with a precious tin of hot dog sausages,” Hennessey reports at one point, then adds: “I’m more amused than worried that this seems now to be a perfectly natural reaction to things.” To admit that takes not merely honesty but courage. It doesn’t mean that Hennessey is intrinsically more bloodthirsty than any of the rest of us, only that when put in a violent and deadly situation, he responded as circumstances required. War does that. “The Junior Officers’ Reading Club” is a dark
book at times, but it’s also smart and funny. Hennessey’s account of his training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst is absolutely delicious, self-mocking and irreverent. His portrayal of a drill sergeant is a classic: “The CSgt was best, his stream-of-consciousness
rants by now the stuff of legend among thirty of us who had as clear a case of Stockholm Syndrome as ever you’re likely to see. Hanging on every word of this man whom we had feared and hated in equal measure but now worshipped and envied, his professionalism, his experience, his implied hardness and the fact that he would come grinning in to work after a leave weekend with impressive bar-brawl scars, growling at us that we’d better not piss him off that day because he loved his wife and if we annoyed him he’d have to beat her because he wasn’t allowed to beat us.” Et cetera. “The Junior Officers’ Reading Club” is a humdinger.
yardleyj@washpost.com
LITERARY CALENDAR SEPTEMBER 20-26, 2010
20 MONDAY | 7 P.M. Rebecca Traister, a senior writer for Salon, discusses and signs her new book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women,” at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-364-1919.
21 TUESDAY | 6:30 P.M. Human rights activist John Prendergast, founder of the Enough Project
(
www.enoughproject.org), discusses and signs the new anthology “The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa’s Worst Human Rights Crimes” (written with actor Don Cheadle) at Borders Books-Downtown, 18th & L Sts. NW, 202-466-4999. 7P.M. Deborah Carnes Christie presents an illustrated discussion of “Green House: The Story of a Healthy, Energy-Efficient Home,” her chronicle of the design and construction of her Modernist home, at Design Within Reach, Bethesda Studio, 4828 St. Elmo Ave., Bethesda, Md., 301-215-7200. 7P.M. Nancy G. Brinker, the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, discusses and signs her new book, “Promise Me: How a Sister’s Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer,” at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 202-364-1919.
23 THURSDAY | 6 P.M. Helena Andrews discusses and signs her new memoir, “Bitch is the New Black,” as part of the “Sweet Charity” author series being held at the bar Policy, 1904 14th St. NW. Admission is $25 and includes two drink tickets and passed appetizers. For details, call 312-957-6094. 7P.M. Mae Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University, discusses and signs her new book, “The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America,” at Barnes & Noble, 4801 Bethesda Ave., Bethesda, Md., 301-986-1761.
BOOK FESTIVALS 2010 | The approach of fall heralds the arrival of numerous literary festivals
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across the region, beginning Sunday with Fall for the Book, which will run through Saturday primarily on the campus of George Mason University in Fairfax.
For complete details, visit
www.fallforthebook.org. The National Book Festival celebrates “A Decade of Words and Wonder” with more than 70 authors and illustrators descending on the Mall from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday (
www.loc.gov/bookfest). The 15th annual Baltimore Book Festival will be held Sept. 24-26 at Mt. Vernon Place; visit
www.baltimorebookfestival.com. The Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival, sponsored by the D.C. Jewish Community Center, will run a little later this year, Oct. 17-27. Visit
www.washingtondcjcc.org for information and details about its annual community writing prize (this year’s theme is “Strangers in a Strange Land”). And Sanfoka Video, Books & Cafe (2714 Georgia Ave. NW)
is hosting its First Annual Multicultural Children’s Book Fair, “Magical Mirrors,” going on now through Sept. 26. The daily hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; call 202-234-4755 or visit
www.sankofa.com for details.
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For more literary events, go to
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KLMNO
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010
WASHINGTON BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER
FICTION 1 GETTING TO HAPPY (Viking, $27.95)
1
By Terry McMillan. The lively cast of “Waiting to Exhale” returns 15 years later, and things are rocky.
2 FREEDOM (FSG, $28). By Jonathan Franzen 2
The relentless fracturing of the suburban Berglund family in St. Paul, Minn.; author of “The Corrections.”
3 THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST 4 THE HELP (Amy Einhorn, $24.95) 16
(Knopf, $27.95). By Stieg Larsson. The Millennium Trilogy ends as Salander hunts for her failed assassin.
61
By Kathryn Stockett. A frank chronicle of the lives of several black maids working in a town in 1960s Miss.
5 THE POSTCARD KILLERS (Little, Brown, $27.99) 6 NO MERCY (St. Martin’s, $24.99) 4
By James Patterson & Liza Marklund. A postcard sent to local newspapers is a European killer’s calling card.
1
By Sherrilyn Kenyon. In this new Dark-Hunter novel, an Amazon warrior visits modern day New Orleans.
7 LOST EMPIRE (Putnam, $27.95). By Clive Cussler 2
and Grant Blackwood. Treasure seekers Sam and Remi Fargo stumble upon a sunken Confederate ship.
8 ZERO HISTORY (Putnam, $26.95). By William Gibson
This high-tech speculative tale, chock full of secrets, revolves around combat wear for the Defense Dept.
9 THE WAY OF KINGS (Tor, $27.99) 2
By Brandon Sanderson. The first of a planned 10-part fantasy saga, “The Stormlight Archive.”
10 SPIDER BONES (Scribner, $26.99) 3
By Kathy Reichs. Dr. Temperance Brennan investigates the death of a soldier 40 years ago in Vietnam.
NONFICTION/GENERAL 1 THE GRAND DESIGN (Bantam, $28)
1
By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Theories that aim to unravel the nature of existence.
2 A JOURNEY: MY POLITICAL LIFE (Knopf, $35) 3 TRUE PREP: IT’S A WHOLE NEW OLD WORLD 2
By Tony Blair. A frank take on 10 years in power by the former prime minister of the United Kingdom.
1
(Knopf, $19.95). By Lisa Birnbach with Chip Kidd. “The Official Preppy Handbook” gets a modern twist.
4 THE POWER (Atria, $23.95). By Rhonda Byrne 4
The author of “The Secret” (both book and film) follows up by unveiling how to get everything you want.
5 CRIMES AGAINST LIBERTY: AN INDICTMENT OF 3
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (Regnery, $29.95) By David Limbaugh. A conservative spin of the record.
6 SH*T MY DAD SAYS (It, $15.99). By Justin Halpern 15
A son gleans wisdom from his 73-year-old dad; the inspiration for a forthcoming sitcom.
7 THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF 8 COURAGE & CONSEQUENCE: MY LIFE AS A
CONSERVATIVE IN THE FIGHT (Threshold Editions, $30). By Karl Rove
9 SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION: EVERYONE IS 1
CONNECTED. CONNECT YOUR BUSINESS TO EVERYONE. (Business Plus, $26.99). By Mitch Joel
10 DELIVERING HAPPINESS: A PATH TO PROFITS, 7
PASSION, AND PURPOSE (Business Plus, $23.99) By Tony Hsieh. The founder and CEO of
Zappos.com.
Rankings reflect sales for the week ended Sept. 12, 2010. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from Nielsen BookScan. Copyright © 2010 by Nielsen BookScan. (The right-hand column of numbers represents weeks on this list, which premiered in Book World on Jan. 11, 2004. The bestseller lists in print alternate between hardcover and paperback.)
6
Paperback Bestsellers at
voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
1
AMERICA’S GREAT MIGRATION (Random House, $30) By Isabel Wilkerson. Black Southerners heading north.
4 1
BOOK WORLD THIS WEEK
COMING IN STYLE
MONDAY | Man in the Woods, by Scott Spencer, is a thriller that combines shrewd plotting, strong characters and gorgeous writing.
TUESDAY | Human Chain is a new collection of poems by Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney.
WEDNESDAY | Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self contains eight quietly devastating
stories by a D.C.-area writer. Sophie Kinsella’s Mini Shopaholic features a toddler who is the terror of shopping
malls.
THURSDAY | Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock.
FRIDAY | The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, by Mae
Ngai.
SATURDAY | In his new comic novel, Exley, Brock Clarke plays postmodern games with the real-life author of “A Fan’s Notes.”
voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
Join us as we debate the issues and authors making news today.
6
Read our blog, Political Bookworm, which focuses on books that stir the national political conversation.
In today’s paper: Book World previews the National Book Festival.
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