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Business News/ Opinion / Book Review | Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us about Conflict
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Book Review | Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us about Conflict

Christopher Coker's new book straddles the twilight zone between dense academic survey and accessible popular history

Photo: Ramesh Pathania/MintPremium
Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint

Christopher Coker’s ambitious new book straddles the twilight zone between dense academic survey and accessible popular history, the balance shifting uneasily along the course of its 300 odd pages.

A professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, Coker has written extensively on war, exploring particularly its relationship with philosophy and technology. In Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us about Conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22, he ventures into the tricky terrain of literature and its engagement with violence, using a cluster of texts from across the centuries to elucidate a set of propositions that does not always appear convincing.

Coker states the first of these early on, when he wonders if literature is a more potent vehicle for expressing compassion than philosophy. It is a tired claim, with no possibility of being established as an objective certitude—and entirely dependent on the choice of texts used to establish or refute it, as the case may be. The History of Peloponnesian War, Thucydides’ masterpiece that set the standards of classical historiography, may put some to sleep, while Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire may be persued by others with the kind of pleasure that is usually reserved for the Sunday magazines.

As Coker himself goes on to admit, there are more dully written works of fiction about war than on any other subject. The remark is typical of his polemics, provocative for the most part, though often at the risk of becoming glib. The best works in the genre of war fiction—Shakespeare’s history plays for instance, if they can be considered as such—refer only tangentially to the dynamics of war, and are more profoundly invested in understanding its psychological costs. Building on this thesis further, Coker defines six distinct archetypes that have been universally present in any situation of conflict since the beginning of civilization: warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims.

Using cultural texts from the antiquity to the 20th century, Coker then attempts to humanize these categories. The project, however, does not end up looking as neat as his classification may make it appear. Imagining these divisions, especially in the context of contemporary geopolitics, can be an ethically problematic activity, more so because the overlaps among these types are inevitable, unavoidable, and have always been so.

Since Homer’s Iliad, with which Coker begins his narrative, there has existed, at the heart of every battle, the desire to seize justice, to set the scores right. Achilles, one of history’s first warriors and on whom Coker lavishes a perceptive section, embodies the dichotomy inherent in such a pursuit—of separating good from evil, black from white.

Like most warriors, Achilles descends into a comfortless grey area. He is seen as a perpetrator of offence by one group and as an avenger of wrongs by another. Achilles’ plight represents the destiny of every soldier who has ever been conscripted. It informs the key emotion invoked by most works of fiction dealing with conflict—what British poet Wilfred Owen called the pity of war.

Most of Coker’s examples are drawn from outside the canon. While this may be a prudent decision—literary analysis of war writing being an oversaturated field—it also forces him to summarize the plot of every novel or story he brings into the narrative. If reading about scores of obscure works can get tedious, it also yields unexpected treasures, such as the section on Leo Tolstoy’s little known novella, Hadji Murat )about a “an orientalised western version of a Chechen warlord", in Coker’s words), or the one on Stanley Kubrick’s film, Dr Strangelove.

Hadji Murat is the only non-western warrior to appear in the pages of Coker’s book. The omission of the East, a flimsy engagement with imperialism, and no reference beyond the time of the Vietnam War make the focus of the book skewed. In spite of these limitations, readers willing to persist with Coker’s at times tendentious style, will come away with a rich list of books to read, and a useful apparatus to do so.

Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com

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Published: 21 Aug 2014, 05:57 PM IST
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