Fallout fog of war skin#

In the end, we are left with a question: If the vaquero of All the Pretty Horses is correct that we canвЂ™t understand horses without warfare, can we then understand warfare without the horse? Put differently, in thinking of the wars we are presently waging, wars we watch on CNN like reality shows, in which technology has fundamentally changed the way we fight and the way we think about fighting, what have we lost and what have we gained? This is the strange and fascinating ambivalence of Far Bright Star and what, ultimately, makes it a great work of art: We feel the passion of war and all the primal urges it evokes, even as we are repulsed by it. It is on this note that Olmstead ends his novel with an extended passage as moving as anything in recent American fiction, in which our protagonist meditates on the war in Europe and the inevitability of his going to meet it. Soon after, we entered the fray in Europe and leapt into a very different kind of fighting, one that didnвЂ™t allow for mounted troops, one fought in trenches and the modernist nightmare of No ManвЂ™s Land. The United StatesвЂ™ involvement in the hunt for Pancho Villa was the last affair in which horses were used extensively as a combat technology. It doesnвЂ™t get away from Olmstead the way it so easily could, and the way it often does with writers working in this tradition.

The prose (and prose poetry) of Far Bright Star achieves the lyrical minimalism of Melville and Faulkner, tempered by the muted precision of Hemingway. We stay close to Napoleon via a narration which, like those of McCarthyвЂ™s Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian, makes of its telling a war-song. OlmsteadвЂ™s achievement is all the more striking given the setting and time and the way in which the author conjures (sometimes through detail, sometimes through rhythm and cadence) the atmosphere of Mexico in the early 20th century. However the technology changes, вЂњthe fog of war,вЂќ the complexity of conflict that obscures everyoneвЂ™s vision when they undertake this disastrous enterprise, remains. Even more impressive is that the novel slows down to focus on one engagement, capturing the fallout of a battle that feels and sounds and looks very real.Д«ut certain aspects of conflict donвЂ™t change, and what OlmsteadвЂ™s characters set out to confront is not what they will end up confronting, and the reason for the novelвЂ™s major battle will not end up being what they-or we-first thought.

Fallout fog of war skin#

It tore away the manвЂ™s nose and cheek meat, his lips and mustache and his eyebrows and all the skin and meat that was the manвЂ™s face.

The bite swallowed whatever cry there might have been.

He knew he was dead and was wondering what death would be like when the Rattler horse, lithe as a cat, lurched onto its front feet, stretched out with its long neck and head and took the manвЂ™s whole face in its wide mouth. The physicality of combat is wondrously strange and fascinating: There are no Predator drones, no JDAMs or laser-guided bombs: The combat Olmstead depicts is personal, and he allows the story heвЂ™s telling to reinforce this depiction organically. One such is our novelвЂ™s protagonist, a seasoned veteran named Napoleon, who leads an ill-fated sortie into the desert with a small band of would-be warriors.ДЄs meticulously researched and evocative as a historical novel could be, Far Bright Star is about war of a very particular brand, the old-world physical combat that seems, in our era of the asymmetrical battlefield, like a thing from another millennium-reading this novel we see how the very nature of war has morphed, not just its accoutrements. While Coal Black Horse relates a young manвЂ™s coming-of-age during the Civil War, OlmsteadвЂ™s latest is set in 1916 Mexico, where adventure-seeking Americans have drifted south of the border to hunt for Pancho Villa and his band of rebels. In Cormac McCarthyвЂ™s All the Pretty Horses, a sage vaquero tells our protagonist that вЂњno man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse.вЂќ The first installment of McCarthyвЂ™s Border Trilogy does not test the legitimacy of this equine maxim, but Robert OlmsteadвЂ™s latest novel, the unapologetically McCarthy-esque Far Bright Star, seems to set for itself precisely that task.ДЇar Bright Star is a sequel, of sorts, to OlmsteadвЂ™s prizewinning Coal Black Horse (2007), both novels dealing extensively with horses and war. LeeвЂ™s maxim: вЂњIt is well that war is so horrible, or we would grow to love it too much.вЂќ August 7th, 2009 Robert OlmsteadвЂ™s new novel demonstrates Robert E.