Flanders

This novel is powerfully moving, illustrating clearly the utter madness and dehumanising effects of total war. Men are torn to pieces by shell fire, laced with rifle and machine gun bullets, gassed or are ravaged by disease in a novel that calmly records these horrors. The effects of such an environment on one young man fighting the Great War is played out in this novel through the letters home of a young Texan fighting in the British army in 1916. Through the hellish landscape of Flanders, Patricia Anthony has produced one of the most powerful war novels of all time. Bleak and emotionally scarring, like the conflict it portrays, this is certain to become a classic of the genre. Despite the horrors, this novel is profoundly spiritual in content and reflects the twisted and shifting social and moral mores of young men in a conflict they barely understood. Without a doubt the best novel I read in 1999.

This was a powerful and triumphant novel of the First World War. Travis Lee Stanhope, an American soldier fighting for the British in France, eloquently tells the story. We suffer with him not only as he fights the war against the Germans, but also as he fights an internal war against the ghosts that haunt him. Travis fights loneliness, alcoholism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. There are all kinds of nastiness in this novel. It is gory and realistic. Some scenes are as horrifying as you could imagine. But ultimately, this was one of the most sensitive and moving novels I have ever read. Recently I have read some excellent war novels (The Black Flower, Fields of Fire, among others). This was as good as (if not better than) any of them. Highly recommended, do NOT miss this one.

What we have in "Flanders" is one of the greatest yet most obscure novels of the 1990s - a sales flop that not only received universal critical praise, but inspires strange passion in practically everyone who reads it. And it should be the next book you read.Patricia Anthony is not only one of the best writers in contemporary fiction, but perhaps the most courageous. While her previous works stretched the boundaries of "science fiction," "Flanders" departs the genre entirely. This bold new direction left her publishing house sputtering in confusion, with frustrating results for everyone. Flanders represents an author with a secure genre career abandoning that security to follow her own path.Here we have one of the great books of the past decade, yet because it was not marketed in any meaningful way, almost no one knows it even exists. I discovered it by accident, rummaging through new books at the library. I took it home, opened it up, and it promptly squashed me like a tater bug on the front grill of a Peterbuilt. In the months since, I have enjoyed steering other people to the book and waiting for their reaction: everyone I know who has read the book comes out of the experience not only in love with it, but moved by it. This is a life-changing book, a cult classic in the making. If it is possible for a book - abandoned by a confused and indifferent publishing industry - to take on a life of its own, then this is the book that will do it. I cannot say this strongly enough: Read this book. Now.

Rarely have I come across a novel which so vividly portrays the brutal experience of trench warfare and the Great War. The never ending rotation from rest area to reserve trenches to front line and back again, with longer and longer periods spent at the front; of life lived in the trenches, surrounded not only by ceaseless imminent death, but by decay and disease, destruction and deep-set rot. The ways humanity finds to adapt and survive whilst living through such an experience, and how the infinite damage done by war is measued in even more than the millions of dead, as if they were not enough. It is also the damage of those who returned, the shell-shocked, the maimed and disfigured; the ones who returned physically whole, but altered, would never be the same again, who must learn to live once again in `normal' society, such a seemingly impossible task. The damage done to the earth herself, dug out, bombed and devastated, who swallowed all the bodies and blood and despair in her own collasping trenches.There is also the hope, the friendships, likes and dislikes, the petty arguments, personal hatreds, prejudice, comradeship, laughter and sorrow and all other things so very human in these totally inhuman surroundings. Whislt the entire novel is set in Flanders during 1916, Anthony still manages to depict very well one of the true tragedies of war, the dislocation and isolation of the soldier, the manner in which such an experience makes it impossible for them to ever really fit back into society once again. Of knowing that even if they make it through the war alive, they are still going to have to live with it for the rest of their lives. After all, these were men and boys coming from relatively `normal' lives, and then they were handed a gun, taught to kill and told it was alright to be murderers for four years. To walk straight back into the old life afterwards was never going to be so simple.That is perhaps one of the most powerful themes to this novel; the manner in which human beings can become accustomed to brutality and violence, how it becomes a way of life until they find themselves capable of murder and rape and savage cruelty. And the painful ironies of war; some bittersweet, such as Riddell, surrounded by the worst excesses of wartime death and destruction, in tears when learning of the natural death of his age-old mother; others just bitter, such as the combined fates of Miller and Leblanc (although I will not into more detail, for fear of spoiling the story.) "Half of my friends were murdered, sir" is all Stanhope can say when, in amongst the deaths of millions, the near justified murder of one individual soldier who had not been able to draw that increasingly blurry line between killing the Germans and killing anybody else, is singled out and prosecuted for all its worth, with terrible repercussions for all around.Most of all, however, this is a book about hope. About redemption, and

In 1916, Texan Travis Lee Stanhope could have had anything. Harvard wanted the brilliant young man, who overcame child abuse. So what was this budding scholar doing in the trenches of Flanders during World War I. Like many of his fellow Americans, Travis has joined the British army seeking adventure. What he has gotten is a mud hole filled with death and disease that he now calls home. Every dawn, Travis ventures into no-man's land between his side and the Germans to kill off some of his enemy. However, the battlefield and the endless bottles of rum are taking their toll on Travis' psyche. In life, Travis feels dead; but in his dreams, he feels alive. Ghosts begin to appear as Travis seems to have the uncanny ability to glimpse at an afterlife or perhaps he has just gone insane. FLANDERS is the best war story in several years, may be decades. The story line graphically portrays the horror of war, especially the battles in the trenches during World War I. Travis, who journeys to salvation within his mind, is a great character because he provides the audience with a TV screen to the horrors of FLANDERS Field. Once again, the incredibly talented Patricia Anthony demonstrates why she is one of the top authors of the nineties with a classic war novel that one day will rank with the great war tales of the century. Harriet Klausner