Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

This is a great book, a book that challenges the comfortable assumptions about war and those who fight it. It's a million miles removed from the patriotic Rambo books but still portrays a group of heroes. Their struggle to relate to the people they are protecting illustrates the disconnect between the regular soldier and those who claim to support them. The prose is sharp, the pace is brisk and I didn't want the story to end.

I found this book very hard to get into, it gave me little or no motivation to keep going. The story is of a group of GI’s who survive a firefight in the 2nd Iraq War and are brought home on a PR exercise. The whole story takes place during the super bowl match over a thanksgiving weekend. In many ways this is just a retelling of Clint Eastwood’s Sands of Iwo Jima. The soldiers look back at the nation they have left and reflect on the differences between where they have been and where they were. In essence the story does not progress any further than that. There exists something of a fathers to son relationship between the sergeant and one of the dead squad members to our protagonist Billy. This is well played out, as well as the sibling relationship between Billy and his elder sister Kathryn. I found the repetitive references to jerking off a bit unnecessary Huge swathes of the book describe the American football game and the half time events, as well as philosophical waffle. I found myself almost scanning the pages, at times losing myself and having to back track. No surprises at the end either. This is not a bad book, it is just that it does nothing that is new for me and the writing did not engage.

Billy is a hero. Like Captain America he has (temporarily) served his time and is now selling war bonds – or at least pushing the modern equivalent of flying the flag – but who for exactly? Not the people wining and dining him and the rest of the squad – they are out for all they can get at the soldiers’ expense. And what about the man who is trying to sell their story of fight and survival to tinsel town – where do his loyalties lie (if not, ultimately, to himself). And just what is this America that Billy is fighting for? Waiting for his half-time appearance at an American Football stadium while stuck in a schedule beyond his control, meeting people whose conflicting opinions and lack of any real-life knowledge of what he’s been through, Billy takes a distant view, the words of those that want to touch him, utilise him, or use him as a sounding board becoming more and more irrelevant as time creeps nearer to his next tour of duty. Beautifully written, with non-standard page layouts and a steady paced built towards a final more honest than most of the secondary characters in this story, this book is bound to draw comparisons with Catch 22. It has that same claustrophobic atmosphere, the same feeling of inert helplessness as, like an insect stuck in crystallising amber, Billy is drawn towards a fate he can viscerally feel if not escape. This must be the most surprising book I’ve read in half a year. That it was written on this topic, that it expresses so well the dichotomy of Billy’s world and those that want a second hand touch of glamour from it, and that the author had the bravery to express Billy’s experiences in the very lay-out of the written page is to be applauded as well as appreciated. Shorn of sentimentality, it’s powerful stuff.

Stoked by the prospect of watching a new Ang Lee adaptation just days away and thanks to its curiously scored and edited trailer, hinting at some Narrative within narratives, I snapped up this remarkable source book, an imagined memoir-of-sorts by Ben Fountain-an author I hadn't known about, but what a talent! Good luck to Mr Lee in bringing this cracker of a satire with all its layers of orgiastic, trenchant verbiage to the screen. Playing out over a single day of a 19 year old just-returned war hero who is being honored along with his squad for a successful shock-and-awe mission in Iraq; as our lone hero drags his heels through the pomp and ceremony of the erected theatre of a Cowboys' Thanksgiving home game complete with a Destiny's Child performance, we the readers get to inhabit the amphitheatre of the "old soul" within him. His inner monologue, a rigorous and continuous commentary on the misguided state-sponsored war he is a part of and the industrial fantasy-making culture machine that is erected around it, is often interrupted by the grotesquerie that invades his senses: from the pyrotechnics of the circus erected to the overwhelming pangs of lust for a cheerleader he's fallen for to his doting sister's persuasive pleads to withdraw from the military service to the flashbacks of the explosive incident-the reason for his unasked-for celebrity status-where he lost his best mate to his interactions with overfed, over-entertained squealing zombie-humans and punch-drunk-with-their-own self-importance corporate lizards. There is also a continuous thread of his squad's story being juiced for a Hollywood adaptation that never quite gets off the ground, which brings to fore the book's and the author's concern for the uninvolved millions engaged in this documented, filmed and televised hyper-reality of war, organised sport and propaganda everyday: it has become the new drug that provides a welcome relief from the chaotic, unrewarding and intricate personal realities. It is interesting that this very well articulated, rip-through-every-artifice stance is encased in one giant thought experiment by this talented creator of fiction. He pulls off this young contemplative wartime hero with absolute triumph-with all of Billy's bile spread evenly between the "telling"-his fabulous expositions fashioned into soliloquies-to-self and "showing"- four incidents: a football game, a boy-leaving-home drama, a film deal and a minor love affair that unfold organically with a cast of full-blooded beings I could place and hear. With a terrific sense of time, place and concern, in one long halftime, Fountain manages to give us a hero for the noughties generation, a generation that finds willingly and unwillingly gorging on increasing post-truth scoops of farcical politics, entertainment-on-tap, derivative culture products and virtual real...