Birds eye view (Books - Fly Away Peter by David Malouf)

David Malouf, an Australian writer, was new to me.  His novella  Fly Away Peter (Vintage International, 1982) has an elegant, even polished voice and an pensive, elegiac tone.  It concerns two young men, Ashley Crowther, an English-educated Australian man of means who returns to live on his father estate.  He hires Jim, a man well-versed in the birds of his native land, to document all the species which live on his property so that they might start a sanctuary.  Through this work, they become much more friendly than men of their distinct classes might ordinarily become.  When World War I breaks out, both men join up and serve.  That's it.  If you're looking for action-packed writing you should look somewhere else. This is a contemplative reading experience about interaction between men and nature, men and themselves, men and each other.  Usually World War I is put forward as the start of mechanized warfare and the birth of a new brand of cruelty, but Fly Away Peter, while not selling the horror of the war short, also sees it as a leveler. Along with the death of chivalry, came the death not of class exactly, but death of the notion that the higher born were somehow more favored by the gods.  If a bomb went off in the trench, it could kill a poor woodsman or an Oxford-educated estate owner equally efficiently.  Fly Away Peter is about the rewards of gaining the perspective of other men or other creatures and, in that it offers some solace amidst all the inhumanity of war.

World War I and the changing roles of women and men (Books - Toby's Room by Pat Barker)

World War I was one of the most influential events of the last century.  Some credit it with ushering in the modern war, the machine age, the birth of the airplane for regular human use, modern music, the spread of modern clinical psychology, and the death of chivalry.  Certainly it heralded the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian monarchies. Killed 8-9 million soldiers, disabled 7 million, and seriously injured 15 million. Germany lost 15% of its adult males, Austria–Hungary 17%, and France 10%.  Another several million civilians starved to death in its wake.  It is little wonder that artists have spent so much time contemplating its devastating reach.  English novelist Pat Barker has made the subject of World War I her literary bread and butter.  Her Regeneration Trilogy fictionalized Siegfried Sassoon's treatment for shell-shock after serving in World War I.  It dramatizes socio-political as well as clinical-scientific complexities of the war experience in a way that makes you feel as thought you were present then.  It's a strong and memorable read.  Her Life Class looked at making art in the context of war and the changes experienced by one young English woman as a consequence.  Pat Barker's latest, Toby's Room, like Life Class, deals with a young painting student named Elinor and her contemporaries, Neville and Paul.  I found it a richer exploration than her last novel of the changes wrought on the younger generation in the wake of the war.