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Library | Shelf Number | Material Type | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Musgrave Library | ANTH W | English Fiction | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Umnini Library | ANTH W | English Fiction | Searching... Unknown |
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Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Flanders Fields, where so many died so horribly during WWI, an American volunteer named Travis Lee Stanhope finds terror, death, forgiveness and, ultimately, an odd sort of salvation. Anthony (God's Fires), one of speculative fiction's brightest talents, has written a novel of the Great War that is worthy of comparison to Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Travis Lee is a wonderfully complex character, a wild boy from Texas who had the brains to win a scholarship to Harvard, a survivor of childhood abuse who hates his alcoholic father but fears he may be turning into him. Uncomfortable at home and at school, Travis, like many young Americans in 1916, enlists in the British army in search of adventure. What he finds instead is the monstrous human meatgrinder that is Flanders in northern France. Few writers have succeeded so well as Anthony in describing the horrors of trench warfare, the mud and disease, the rotting bodies and unending bombardment, the virtually universal madness that turns men into killers and rapists. Travis Lee is a talented sharpshooter, but as months of terror go by and the number of his kills grows, he beings to see things, at first in his dreams and later on the battlefield itself. Ghosts begin to haunt him, unwilling or unable to leave the shell craters and barbed wire where their lives ended. Told by a battlefield chaplain that he's gifted with the Second Sight, Travis Lee repeatedly finds himself wandering in an unearthly cemetery, a melancholy place that nonetheless hints at the possibility of eternal life. This is a harrowing and beautiful novel, demonstratingagainthat Anthony is one of our finest writers, in and out of the genre. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
One of sf's most idiosyncratic talents produces a haunting, sometimes almost hallucinatory, yet surprising war novel. Her narrator, Travis Lee Stanhope, is a young Texan and Harvard graduate, a sharpshooter attached to a British unit on the front lines in France in 1916. Travis Lee writes a series of letters home to his younger brother in which he describes combat and also his exchanges about Shelley's poetry and the nature of love with his sensitive British commander. Travis Lee, with his troubled childhood and brilliance, has never fit in before and at first finds a sort of home in combat: popping off Germans as they stick their heads up from their trenches is only a game. But as the war goes on, and his friends are gassed and disemboweled, he loses his sensitivity and at times even his sanity. Conversations with a consoling priest help, but at last he becomes addicted to rum, brute sex, and ritual violence. He begins to have nightmares, specifically of a graveyard where the newly dead arise and beckon him. No amount of rum can block his vision of purgatory, and though this novel is not science fiction at all, Travis Lee does enter a new world. Mad, he is drawn into a religious delusion that beyond the strewn bodies in Hell and the walking dead of Purgatory lies Heaven. It is hard to know what drove Anthony to such a departure from her routine, but she brings it off splendidly. --John Mort
Library Journal Review
Assigned to a British army unit as a sharpshooter in World War I, Texan Travis Lee Stanhope serves as a sniper in Flanders in 1916. As days of carnage and attrition alternate with an eerily pastoral dreamworld of the dead, Stanhope becomes a bridge across a different kind of No Man's Land. Anthony's (God's Fires, Ace, 1997) subtle and innovative storytelling reaches a new plane in her latest novel, a foray into magical realism that contrasts the waking hell of war with the fragile peace of eternity. An excellent candidate for readers of mainstream war fiction, this compelling story belongs in most libraries' general or fantasy collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.