Sixty years after the armistice, the horrors of the First World War were still spurring antiwar literature, one of the most compelling of which is Timothy Findley's The Wars. Slim and elliptical, but told with a level-headed, lyrical clarity, The Wars traces the atrocities and absurdities of war through the journey of a young Canadian officer through trenches in which barbarism and civilization exist side by side.
Timothy Findley's slim, dense novel
The Wars offers nothing short of an explanation of human violence. However alien or mad Findley's World War I events become, war itself is repeatedly depicted as damnably quotidian. A front-line nurse confesses, "the passions involved were as ordinary as me and my sister fighting over who's going to cook the dinner. And who won't." Bringing Dostoyevsky's moral palette to the trenches of the Great War,
The Wars seems compelled to reveal how the same men who save one another's lives will also torture trench rats or stray cats for sport.
Written in surgically precise prose and studded with unforgettable scenes and memorable characters, The Wars is Findley at his best. In Cambridgeshire are "towns with names like Camden Lights and Grantchester--roads that wind past canals and over bridges--whirl you round a hundred village greens, scattering geese and waving at children--whip you past the naked swimmers in the ponds and deposit you at inn yards where the smell of ale and apples makes you drunk before you've passed the gate." Informed, compassionate, and insightful, The Wars is uniquely sensitive to the causes of social division and union. --Darryl Whetter
