The other night, I read Richard Bausch’s new novel, Peace.
(Don’t be impressed. It’s a short novel, and difficult to put down once you begin.)
It is intense and brutal. Set in the winter of 1944, some American soldiers in Italy have been sent on a reconaissance mission. The men are led by an elderly Italian man who speaks a bit of English, claiming to have been in the US for a time when he was younger.
The three soldiers are bound, not only in their present mission and attendant suffering, but also by what they had witnessed shortly before: a crime committed by their sergeant.
An increasingly treacherous journey up a terrible mountain. Being led into the unknown by a stranger they really do not trust, not really liking each other much, a usually unspoken tension regarding the sergeant’s crime, fear of attack – which comes in the form of a sniper, a suspicion of pointlessness about the mission on which they have been sent shaken both by a sudden awareness of the horrors being inflicted on the innocent within their hearing, but a sense of helplessness about what they, themselves can do, and always, always, a yearning for home.
Peace.
Sorrowful, even in the hope it digs up (for that is the sense of this book, even if it is about climbing – it digs and digs. Burrows. Not a cheery end of rainbows assuring us that all will be well once the driving rain stops and the rainbows appear. But neither is it nihilistic, at all. Yes, Bausch says, peace, but here on earth, it is a peace that can neither forget what came before or pretend that what awaits around the next bend even cares.
Although the book is relatively short, Bausch’s gifts are such that the characters emerge fully, not as caricatures, but as complex human beings, tied up in knots as they forge on, propelled by a combination of self-preservation, duty and compassion. The novel is about war, certainly, but it is also about the bigger war called your life and mine and the violent bearing it away.
Highly recommended – and if your parish reading group can handle the language – recommended for that, too.