Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
Author: Kurt
Vonnegut
Publisher:
Dell Publishing (Random House)
Publish
date: 1969
ISBN: 3
2300 01771154 6
Book quote:
‘Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a
psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of
wonderful new lies, or people just
aren’t going to want to go on living.”’
So, you
know how everyone has a long list of ‘classics’ they think they ought to read
at some point? If this book is on your list of to-reads, get the hell down to
the local library and get yourself a copy because it’s freakin’ amazing. The Mysteries of Udolpho: disappointment.
This one: not.
I don’t
want to write a 5,000 word review on this that would barely scratch the surface
anyway. In short…
Summary: The main character is Billy
Pilgrim, a gawky, ridiculous private American soldier in WWII, who gets taken
prisoner of war and happens to survive the firebombing of Dresden because he
ended up in a subterranean meat locker. He returns to the States, marries a
rich girl and becomes an optometrist, then after a bump on the head caused by a
plane crash, starts insisting he was taken captive by aliens years ago, and has
been time-travelling randomly for years before that. The story is sandwiched by
a couple of slices of narration from the author, who also makes a small cameo
appearance being incontinent in a POW camp.
In a quick scout along the review circles,
there’s a lot of noise about the humour, the oblique portrayal of the
supposedly central event of the firebombing of Dresden, and what the ‘message’
is. Strangely, the copy I have has a review-snippet from The Boston Globe on it saying: ‘Poignant and hilarious, threaded
with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral
statement.’ Odd, because it seems that apart from compassion there is no moral
statement made at all by the book. No claims, no pretentiousness.
The most extraordinary aspect of the book
for me is the structure. The structure is, as far as I can ascertain, entirely
unique, and mirrors the content and possibly the ‘message’ (if there is one) of
the book. The little aliens that run through the novel have the peculiar quality
of being able to see Time as a flat surface – that is, all points at once. So
they describe their own novels as ‘There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no
suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.’ Which is pretty much what
Slaughterhouse Five is. As Billy shoots about the linear timeframe, slipping
from 1945 to 1969 is a morphine-induced haze or whatever uncontrolled state he’s
in, we see pieces drift into place, slowly coming into focus, fitting in. It’s
like a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a huge canvass with hundreds of participants,
but nothing in central focus apart from a kind of whirling void, where the
bombing is. You can look closely at each mini-scene, and there will be humour
and pathos and grotesqueness and beauty. What they add up to is entirely open
to the viewer, but we’re left damn sure it’s all part of an immensely bigger
picture that couldn’t possibly fit into a 2d canvas. It also reminds me of a
musical piece. A symphony, where recurrent motifs pop up in the middle of
something. Ah, there’s that four falling notes on the oboe again, what’s it
doing here? You’re not quite sure, but it’s definitely connecting those images.
Orange and black. The POW trains crawling through the countryside, the boat
outside the room on Billy’s honeymoon night, the stripes of the marquee at
Billy’s daughter’s wedding. A hum, a buzz. Blue and ivory, on the feet and
hands of corpses and those who are in some way coming close to death. This
novel has abandoned both the linear form and straight descriptions, as there is no way to describe the central
event. Instead we focus on the colour of boots, on the smell of ‘mustard gas and
roses’.
The author’s words present the alien
abductions and details as ‘the truth’, which simultaneously allowing the reader
to note that all the extra-terrestrial details Billy experiences, as well as
the whole aspect of time-travel and linear discombobulation, come from the
writings of single science-fiction writer within the novel. We’re also told
that many people found some solace in science fiction, as the normal parameters
of morals and straightforward existence did not seem to function or be relevant
in the aftermath of something like WWII. An alternate reality that may in some
way make the completely irrational, acceptable.
Vonnegut comments about linearity and the
nature of writing a retrospective narrative, comparing himself to Lot’s wife:
‘People aren't supposed to look back. I'm
certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next
one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it
was written by a pillar of salt.’
I’m stopping there. The book’s an absolute
rip-roarer of ingenuity and frankly genius. Five stomping moose-hoofs up.
