The Things They Carried

As promised, I'm now going to review a 'real' book - by which I mean a novel covering slightly weightier material than in the last post. 'The Things They Carried' is a novel I read when I was doing my A-levels - we had to write a comparative essay, either comparing 'The Go-Between' with 'Spies' by Michael Frayn or 'The Things They Carried', by Tim O'Brien. I am very lazy, so I went for the easy option and used 'Spies', which was basically a retelling of 'The Go-Between', set during WWII.

However lazy I might be, I was still curious enough to read TTTC (oooh, I only just realised how many words in the title begin with a 'T'...), and I am delighted that I did! It is a brilliantly written novel, far more interesting than the easy option I went with (though I'm still glad I did, it was the most straightforward essay I ever wrote).

It is set during the Vietnam war, Tim O'Brien having served in 'Nam (I've always wanted to write that - you can say what you want about the war, but it has the coolest abbreviation of any war), and takes the form of several, loosely connected short stories. They share a common narrator and many common characters, as well as various thematic links.

The narrator is clearly fairly autobiographical (can a person be autobiographical? I don't know... The narrator is based on O'Brien, anyway), being a writer who can only write about Vietnam (O'Brien can famously only write about Vietnam), and is exploring various ideas, which are, presumably, O'Brien's own thoughts.

He transmits the pain experienced by his characters very clearly, as well as the different ways they have been broken by this war. The disjointed nature of the stories cleverly expressed his views on the truthfulness of stories, as well as the way one's memory of a traumatic event is unreliable (I'll be honest here - that bit is straight out of my A-level. Sorry.).

This is a fascinating account of war and its effects on the participants, containing ideas and themes that will be familiar to anyone who has looked at WWI literature, though rather more graphically expressed. It is at times touching, at others tragic and occasionally almost repellent in its honesty.