Book Review: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

AMONG the very few positives to emerge from the cataclysm of the Second World War was a shelf-ful of novels, some of which have weathered time better than others.

One of the first British writers to describe life during wartime was Henry Green, whose wonderful 1943 book Caught focusses on the firemen who toiled to save blitzed London.

Three years later came Eric Linklater’s Private Angelo which, like several of its successors, satirised the author’s own experience, albeit through the eyes of a feckless Italian conscript who conspicuously lacks courage. Many more writers, most notably Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, were quick to convert their wartime memories into fiction.

On the other side of the pond the early war novels offered unvarnished accounts of the horrors mere foot soldiers had endured. The most graphic – and famous – of these was Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, which was remarkable for its unflinching honesty and the pervasive sense of ennui and fear.

It was not until the 1960s, however, that two of the best books were published. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 appeared in 1961 and – as its blurb said – offered “a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane”. War, as Heller realised, was a lunatic act and the only way to cope was to view it as absurd. In that regard, his hero, a bombardier named Yossarian, struggling with the thought that thousands of people he has never met want to kill him, is like every soldier irrespective on which side of the combat he’s on.

After galloping through Catch-22 many readers waited for Heller to write a sequel or a successor but when that showed no sign of materialising they turned instead to Slaughterhouse-Five. This smart new edition marks the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. It was Vonnegut’s sixth novel and it obviously caused him considerable angst. During the war he had been captured at the Battle of the Bulge and imprisoned in the German city of Dresden, aka “the Florence of the Elbe”. In February 1945, when it was beginning to be clear that the Allies were close to victory, Dresden was bombed almost to obliteration. Around 25,000 people were killed and countless buildings destroyed. To this day the legitimacy of the air assault remains controversial. Some say that Dresden was of little strategic military importance but this is contested by those who insist the city was vital to the German war effort.

Vonnegut, who was born in 1922 and died in 2007, was one of the lucky ones. As the bombs rained down, he took refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse which would give him his title. It was the war’s gift to him and he knew that he must bide his time until he could use it to his advantage. As he says at the novel’s outset, “as a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations”, he had outlined Dresden’s story many times, but his “famous book” remained more talked about than real.

He found war difficult to put into words. While others’ novels were made into movies starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra, he promised that if ever his book was filmed neither of them would have a part. When it was filmed, in 1972, the role of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s hero, was taken by Michael Sacks, who eventually gave up acting to work on Wall Street.

So it goes, as Vonnegut would doubtless say. Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five, it is reassuring to know that its prose still sings and stings and that Billy’s fabulous pilgrimage is no redemptive journey but a quest to a place in which madness thrives.

This new edition contains unnecessary appreciations by several writers and reprints an illuminating Paris Review interview with Vonnegut from 1977 during which he was asked if he’d shot anybody in the war. “I thought about it. I did fix my bayonet once, fully expecting to charge.” But he didn’t charge. “If everybody else had charged, I would have charged, too. But we decided not to charge. We couldn’t see anybody.” So it goes.