Sunday Evening Reads- A Farewell to Arms

After the (relative) success of the Graphic Novel Wednesday reviews launched a few weeks ago, I'm setting up a book review a week to go out on Sundays. And much like the Graphic Novel segment it won't be all about reviewing brand new releases, brilliantly cutting edge texts or specifically those regarded as classics- I'll be reviewing books I'm reading, whether they were released last week or last century, whether they were huge hits or are largely ridiculed, or anything in between. I've got a horribly eclectic taste, so you probably won't like many of the titles, but you never know, you might spot something you fancy having a peruse of yourself. Why Sundays? Well, what better day of the week to curl up next to an imaginary fireplace on an evening with a good book?

The first review, then, is Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

It's the first Hemingway I've read apart from a short story entitled A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. And coming to Hemingway for the first time took a fair bit of adjustment. His sparse, bare-faced style of prose just didn't draw me in initially, not holding my attention with a lack of with its lack of description, a lack of adjectives and adverbs that made it seem incredibly simple and, if I'm honest, a bit boring. The fact that his narration is pure and efficient was lost on me, with simplistic sentences such as "The light shone on their hats" being too abrupt and too frequent for an eye used to skipping through chunks of poorly written exposition or unnecessary details about the building in which the characters are stood in order to glean the important points.

With Hemingway though, as I realised after about forty pages, everything is important. The swiftness with which I normally read slowed in order to take in such fine detail completely.

The story, once the way in which Hemingway tells his stories has you acclimatised, is equally gripping. It's the First World War and an effectively expatriated American Lieutenant is serving on the Italian front as an ambulance driver. He is introduced to a nurse, Catherine Barkley, and his relationship with her throughout the harsh campaigns and eventual collapse of the Italian front drives the story, with grim realities as a backdrop and antagonist to their romance and events in their relationship. So far, so seemingly simple- though I can see now why so many people rate Hemingway so well. He not only sets up on of the bleakest environments in which to throw lovers, he does so with deft restraint, only implying certain important points but fuelling those implications, framing them, so effectively that the reader cannot miss them. Hemingway writes like a line pencil artist draws- strokes of detail here and there, building the frame, the silhouette, into which he occasionally cross-hatches, but mostly leaving the characters to be white space filled by the reader based on his thick and thin sketching.

Frederick Henry, the name given to the semi-autobiographical lieutenant or tenente, is wounded and spends time in a field hospital where his relationship with Catherine grows, and finally they embark upon a companionship dealing personal tragedy to them among the desensitising terror of the front. The book becomes so much more than a mere romance, with the two protagonists discussing life, planning futures and falling fully for one another convincingly, written with soft and delicate understanding rarely seen in the obligatory love sub-plots now thrown into the majority of novels across all genres.

Hemingway finds a way to make turning the page feel like you are Frederick, living out those moments, unsure of what it is around the corner. As he himself lived out many of the moments and encounters he depicts this is hardly surprising, but A Farewell To Arms is more than semi-autobiographical. A friend of mine told me I might find it refreshing, and she was oddly right. Though in the closing act neither Frederick nor I as a reader wanted to know the the outcome, I turned the pages anyway just as he returned to Catherine, because no knowing was worse. Though the culmination of the story so thoroughly beats the reader down with the bleakness of war and life, I did ironically find it refreshing, because in doing so I still wanted to read on and that is a hard to find quality in so many books from such a presently saturated market.

As books go, I now rate this as a favourite- stick with it past twenty pages and Hemingway somehow makes the emotions, horrors and people found at the front more real than most would with pages of description as their method, and he does so almost without writing a single word to colour or shape them in your mind's eye. They just are, and he only needs to say so, nothing more.