I received the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery for Christmas, Messenger of Truth, and was stunned yet again by how very good Jacqueline Winspear is at mixing mystery and history together. This series has impressed me from the very beginning in the way Winspear tackles the post WWI period in Britain and is unflinching in how she shows the many devastating ways the war affected the British people. Her second book, Birds of a Feather, in particular really blew me away but this fourth book was wonderful as well. I had no idea until reading it that the military sent artists out to the trenches. It was some sad attempt at propaganda that never panned out (do you remember seeing fun paintings of war?) and certainly didn't result in the kind of work they thought it would. Winspear uses this odd footnote in history to explore whether or not an artistic temperament would be more damaged then others by the nightmare of the trenches (and also what truths an artist would choose to protray). She also imparts a great deal of history to her readers - without anyone realizing it of course. From the very beginning she pays thanks to artist Paul Nash in particular for inspiring her with his work. Here's a quote of his on the book's opening page:
I am no longer an artist interested and anxious.
I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men
who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever.
Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a
bitter truth, and may it burn in their lousy souls.
Here are some examples of Nash's work from the war - all of them staggering and impressive. It is Nash's words that really blow me away though, "...it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn in their lousy souls."
Images of war - images of truth - have really been on my mind a lot lately. I'm reading A Good War is Hard to Find and Iraq: A War, for a combined review in the next month or so and also just finished The Collaborator of Bethlehem which paints images with words on violence and war that are enough to sear in any brain. (It's an amazing new mystery - first in a series - and I'm very excited about it.) War and what we know is true about it is just very much on my mind these days. That might be why I was inordinately bothered by this mention in the recent Bookslut, "Judging a Book by its Cover" feature:
This past year has brought on a passel of Iraq memoirs, piled up on bookshop display tables like presents under a tree, or kittens in a window. They plead to be taken home so that you can curl up with them in your armchair and gradually come to experience that unpleasant vertiginous feeling that has caused you to flip past the front page of the newspaper and straight to the movie reviews for the last -- oh, going on three years now.
But say that you feel nostalgia for the politically aware self that you dimly remember? The one who was photographed holding so many pithy signs, before you came to suspect that Magic Marker, Posterboard and Rocking in the Free World might not have been what actually ended the war in Vietnam.
Well, you’ll hard-pressed to tell which tome about How Life in Iraq Really is Under American Occupation is the book for you. It’s not uncommon for books within a genre to mimic each other, but this lot have all melded together in a harmonious sea of grainy photography and soothing earth-toned accents. It’s like they are collectively trying to distract you into thinking that they contain ancient, non-threatening “Masterpiece Theater” style history, instead of events that are younger than your DVD player.
Chandrasekaran’s book gets ultimate badness honors here, because the cover (jeeps silhouetted against earth tones) is such a missed opportunity to play with such a great and fanciful title. To have no tin men, no dogs in baskets, (no green even) seems unconscionable.
I don't care if a book cover is glamorous or not when it comes to war; I don't care about anything but that it tells me the truth. I want to see the truth and hear the truth and while we are talking truth in history - all that marching and "Magic Marker, Posterboard and Rocking in the Free World" did have a lot to do with the ending of the Vietnam War. Never underestimate the power of a march, or of the ensuing pictures that make sure the whole world knows about it.
Paul Nash is one of my new heroes. Telling a bitter truth - what more noble a cause could any human endeavor to pursue?
