Book #33

Resistance
by Owen Sheers

Another recommendation from school, this one, once again, from my friendly neighborhood librarian. Third time's the charm.

Resistance by Owen Sheers

From the blurb aback the cover:

Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers's debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of considerable grace and power.

The subsequent statement is true. The preceding statement is false. The novel is beautifully written, with some of the finest descriptions of a particularly lovely place I can recall reading; it has, as well, some rather horrid elements, both naturally occurring and imagined by the author -- thus making the work both realistic and creative, and an excellent piece of writing. Grace and power, as the blurb states; the grace is in the paeans to the land, and to the people who farm it, and to the buried treasure revealed near the end, while the power is in the savage way the war destroys all of those things, spiritually, physically, or both. However: to call this a debut novel is deceptive, though accurate; Owen Sheers has published award-winning poetry and popular non-fiction in the past, and so this poetic, realistic novel is not too much of a stretch for him. To say that it unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller is simply not true: this book is not a thriller. It is a poem about the beauty of a place, about the wonder of calling that place "home" and the honor of working hard to make it so, and it is an indictment of those who would destroy our homes in war.

This book would now become one of my chief recommendations, were it not for the time and place that I live. Oh, it is appropriate in many ways: I live in a small and rural community that borders a large and thriving metropolis which feels like a separate world because the members of this community create a mental difference disproportionate to the physical one; yet there is great and sometimes terrible beauty here. This country is, at least ostensibly, at war (Our president recently made reference to the novel's war, in fact, albeit in his own inimitably moronic and offensive fashion), and I am sure there are plans set and waiting for the formation of a militia in defense of this country should it be invaded; the war has gone on too long and the soldiers surely feel as do the German soldiers in this book. But my fellow Americans would not accept, I think, the harsh and unbending criticism of war that is Resistance, particularly its hard-to-swallow, but no less true, indictment of those who leave their homes and abandon their families in a futile attempt to protect them from invaders. The hardest part of this novel is the end (To which, I admit, I am not yet fully reconciled), when the reader realizes that the true villains of the piece are not the Nazis, despite their remarkable ability to serve as the most heinous villains of all history and all popular culture for the last seventy years; the villains of this novel are the men who join the Resistance.

An excellent and challenging work. A