One thing I have to get right out of the way: this book was,
in many ways, not exactly what I had expected. But then again, perhaps that’s
because I didn’t exactly have a clear idea of what to expect. Until a short while ago, the most I knew about this
book was that it was an anti-war novel, and that it was something of a classic.
That was literally it.
Then a couple of months ago, over drinks down a pub (where many great stories begin), I was talking
to one of my oldest friends which, along with other important matters like
Doctor Who, awesome presents, and what titles we could come up with for porn
movie titles of classic movies, we also discussed reading and writing, including
my own science fiction novel that I had been working on-and-off for some time,
with one key idea being the main protagonist finding himself travelling
mentally backwards and forwards in time. This, to my surprise, brought up the
main plot of Slaughterhouse 5, in which main protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds
himself doing the exact same thing, going backwards and forwards in time,
mainly from travelling from two key periods in his life: his time as a prisoner
of war and his eventful life afterwards, which included getting married,
getting a job as an optometrist, and living on the planet Tralfamadore.
As you can imagine, this wasn’t what I had expected from an ‘anti-war
classic’.
Of course, it was only a week or so later, after my friend
had actually bought me a copy of the novel for me to read, that I discovered
just how completely unusual it is, not just in terms of war stories, but in literature
overall.
The first thing that leaped out was how much author Kurt
Vonnegut was himself a part of the story and its telling, including an opening
and closing chapter on some of his personal experiences and even how he came to
write the story and why he wanted/needed to write it. This actually threw me
off at first because I was just expecting the novel to simply leap into the
story of Billy Pilgrim, but after finishing the novel, I think it’s one of
those key things that I’ll appreciate more on a second reading. Because it
establishes that the writer of this story and his experiences are as important
as the story he’s telling. Considering that, in my experience, writers
themselves when it comes to fiction at least tend to be essentially invisible
when telling their stories, the fact that Vonnegut not only does this but does
it in such a way that he doesn’t come across as a massively pretentious wanker
is already incredibly fascinating.
The second thing that leaped out about the novel was how
funny and blackly satirical it was at times. Vonnegut’s writing is packed with
brilliantly deadpan wit, especially when telling things that were at the same
time absolutely ridiculous and perfectly everyday. This is never more clear
than how he presents death in the book, something that is not only commonplace
but is always punctuated with the words, ‘So it goes’. His continual use of
these three words at the end of every single death described, even if those
deaths were completely horrific – no, especially
if those deaths were completely horrific – was something that I always found
blackly hysterical. This is mostly due to the deliberate detachment Vonnegut
has to most of the characters, as the writer himself admits at one point that
in this book there are no characters, at least not in times of war, with
everyone growing essentially detached from both their own lives and from life
itself.
Even in Pilgrim’s life both before and after the war, there
are many characters – including those in Billy’s own family, especially his
daughter – that don’t come across as human beings as such. Not to call them
flat or one-dimensional, but more that they have a detachment and lack of human
empathy or sympathy at times that reminds me a great deal of the works of Roman
Polanski. Another great friend of mine, Jean, who has written some brilliant analytical reviews of Polanski’s
work, has noted that a common theme amongst his films is that a great deal of
them involve protagonists who are sympathetic victims that are surrounded by ‘monsters’,
in his terms – men and women who generally seem to lack empathy or sympathy or
even humanity, even if it’s in the mundane way possible. This is, to me, the
perfect way to describe a great deal of the characters in Vonnegut’s novel. The
one time a character is even described as such is someone who we’ve always been
told is essentially a doomed man, a victim that’s heading for, like many other people
in war, a meaningless death.
Now, for the time travel. I’m a
man who loves his time travel in
stories – whether comedic or dramatic, some of my favourite stories have
involved brilliant uses of this storytelling device. In fact, when it comes to
many stories, there are times when I take it too seriously – Looper’s use of it
was great throughout its first half, with a protagonist facing himself in both
his past and his future, and neither viewpoint particularly likes the other,
but then the completely non-sensical ending partially ruined it for me (the
rest of it was ruined by a second half that just did not seem to fit the
brilliantly nourish and character based first half) – so I was worried whether
my obsession over things like cause and effect, what can and can’t be changed
and any ‘rules’ of time travel that are presented in a story that are or are
not adhered to, might ruin my enjoyment of a novel, even a greatly loved
classic. But Slaughterhouse 5 is a story that has used it in a way that I’ve
never really seen used before, and it’s one that I adore.
Firstly, whenever Billy Pilgrim
travels, he always seems to know exactly where he is in his life. If he arrives
in 1945, he knows he’s a prisoner of war in Germany. If he arrives in 1968, he
knows he is a widower with a daughter. He even knows the exact date he’s going
to die and how. And he never really attempts to change or prevent a single
moment – once again, there’s a key detachment that’s focused on, and the
detachment that Billy has is to time itself. He still finds degrees of
happiness and sadness in his life, but overall, he has a unique perspective of
time that no one else has. It’s almost like an experience of life that has been
edited for Billy in the wrong order, and he just allows himself to go wherever
time takes him, whether it’s as something as blissful as his honeymoon or
whether it’s something as terrible as seeing the ruins of a bombed city and
digging out rotting bodies out of ‘corpse mines’ afterwards.
The way Vonnegut has used time
travel here is unlike anything I’ve seen in other time travel stories, mostly
because it just works on so many layers. Looking at how the narrative and Billy
constantly switch from the war to afterwards, I can’t help but think of the
perfect metaphor here of how everything about war never truly leaves you.
Afterwards, you can get married, you can have kids, you could even get abducted
by aliens and fuck Hollywood stars on an alien world, in Billy’s case, and you
can even experience things as terrible as grief. But as much as you can try to
focus on the good things afterwards, war never truly leaves you. The things a
man sees, the things a man lives through. The soldiers and the innocents who
die in such conflicts. The sheer soullessness
of it all. Vonnegut has written a war novel unlike any other by doing what all
the greatest science fiction writers have done: using a key science fiction
idea to put across something important – perhaps something even deeply
important and personal to the writer himself – to allow a reader an easier
understanding of something that perhaps is almost impossible to understand
unless it’s something they’ve been through.
But I think Vonnegut’s novel is a
lot more than just about war. It’s about life and death – these two extremes
especially – and everything in between. It’s about how broken and fractured
life is in general, about those moments that we always come back to, the best
and the worst. It’s about all the things I’ve mentioned and, I strongly
suspect, so much more that I’ve missed, and therefore make it a story that I
will inevitably come back to. It is literally quite unlike any other novel I’ve
ever read, and one I am so grateful to have read.
