WAR

It is not often that we are gifted in modern fiction with an opening paragraph like this one:

"The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Ninevah and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

This is from Kevin Powers' first and newly published novel, The Yellow Birds. It is a small book as size and length go, but it takes neither of those to build good--no, make that excellent--writing. Powers' book is decidedly of another era, I think, and I cannot help but be reminded of my old friend Ernest Hemingway as I read the prose here. The language is sparse but cutting, elegant but understated, and I have read no other work about our latest wars that speak with the power that this one does. I cannot quite put my finger on it. There is something intangible in his language and at the same time it is altogether ancient and timeless and real. The novel is moving in a way that makes you think on things you would not otherwise.

We are at war and have been for a long time. We forget this. That is understandable, but perhaps not forgivable. War, too, is ancient and timeless and real and more, of course. Perhaps the very nature of the subject lends itself to the strength of Powers' narrative, but I think it is more a product of the artist here. We who have never been to a war cannot understand all that it does to the people who do go, people who we mostly know of, but who are more and more apart from us, left to do our fighting and killing while we daily reap the benefits. Our wars do not engage the full conscience of our citizenry any longer. And that is one reason why a book of this magnitude is important and necessary.

I think a lot, though, about what war asks of those who come back from it and that is really what this book is about. The most striking part of The Yellow Birds is a masterfully constructed pages-long sentence that gets to the core of one of the primary questions in this novel. How do you go away to a war to spend months and years in a confined theater of violence and destruction, thinking hourly of death, how to bring death to others and to keep it from yourself, only to come back home from that to try and live an ordinary life where bills must be paid and children raised and the lawn mowed?

" . . . because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever . . ." 

I rarely say it as directly to my own readers, but I really do hope you will read this book. Because I truly believe that one day soon people will be required to read it in the same way that so many have been required to read The Things They Carried or All Quiet on the Western Front. It will stun you and make you flinch, but you will recognize immediately its quality and the human truths from our own wars that it so perfectly conveys.