Seathrun O’H-airt
We have finally come full circle.
The end of another academic year marks the beginning of optimism and the glowing summer months. People are dying as civil war rages on in the Ivory Coast and the Queen’s suitcases are being packed while she prepares to visit to Ireland for the first time a Monarch has been here in almost a hundred years.
So it goes.
I began this series by recommending books I felt could supply a little warmth or comfort to young people. That is, before they find themselves unable to identify with their younger selves. I think very few of us want to see ourselves as grownups and yet we are drifting in that grey area between adolescence and adulthood. Our youth and freedoms are under attack from encroaching maturity and the real world. It’s a worrying thought.
Slaughterhouse Five is a about Billy Pilgrim, a young 22 year old German American and a former soldier in the Second World War. He was present during the fire-bombing of Dresden in WWII and currently finds himself “unstuck in time”. This invention allows the protagonist the gift of time travel… with aliens… on their home planet Tralfamadore.
This all seems a little ridiculous and preposterous and it absolutely should not “work”, but it does. Kurt Vonnegut inexplicably manages to interweave, seamlessly, stories about the war and personal tragedies amongst, seemingly, the most random tales about aliens and sex and JFK, into a great absurdist classic. Pilgrim relives and reveals, through time travel, to the reader, occasions in his life, ranging from extremes to the banal, from before the war and even up until the moment of his death. In being written in an easygoing and simplistic style, such a conceit can be granted to the author.
While J.D. Salinger’s Holden struggled to understand the world that he moved through, Ellis’ character’s simply ignore it, and Burgess’ “Droogs” immerse themselves in it, Billy’s world simply is and he leaves it for us to decipher and comprehend, “take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all… bugs in amber.”
Vonnegut’s greatest gift is his ability to move from a facetious and crude joke, that of which you might expect from an Al Murray Pub Landlord set, to devastatingly sensitive and haunting passages concerning broad themes and structural complexities.
I assure you, if you are put off by the terms “Science-Fiction”, or even “Tralfamadorians”, you need only read the Author’s depiction of “the Children’s Crusade” or his tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, and you will find yourself completely and utterly absorbed.
Who is this single man to make decisions upon universal solutions, let alone trouble us with his workings? Vonnegut tells the tale of a young man and how he comes to terms and deals with greater responsibilities.
It is a novel that refuses to subscribe to any rigid authority in its structure, style or narrative. It is wholly original and it calls for rebellion and original thinking on every single page. This free will serves as our only defence against the forced upon order of things today, and in this, surely, we have found the very meaning of freedom.
