Novel-Relishing Obdurate Militarists,

With the hot, sunny weather – tyre blow-out weather – I’ve spent a lot of time reading in the garden, and a long time before my trip to Glasgow Airport (I crossed the Kincardine Bridge on the way home) and even before being annoyed at the Israelis and their bullheadedness during Sunday AM, I finished reading the final pages of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Due to my miserly ways (although technically, I probably did not save any money), I searched for a cheap item on Amazon so that my order (Nine Times That Same Song by Love is All) qualified for free (but much slower) delivery. I decided to go along with the crowd and buy a book by Kurt Vonnegut, the reviewers pointed me in the way of Slaughterhouse Five.

Vonnegut utilises his experiences of WWII and the Dresden bombings to tell the semi-autobiographical story of a misfit soldier, Billy Pilgrim. Slaughterhouse-Five was a quick book to read, but yet it spans over the entire life of Billy Pilgrim and ingeniously points out the absurdity of some of the conventions and fashions in society and, more obviously, the idiocies and peculiarities that occurred during the war. What makes Slaughterhouse-Five special is how the protagonist Pilgrim is portrayed as a hopeless, naïve and benevolent boy - I know even these soldiers are braver than me - a character who is probably closer to the reality than the glorified heroes who feature in many other war novels.

Billy Pilgrim’s ability to time-travel is a stroke of genius on the author’s part; Billy travels between the war, the field hospital, his time on the planet Tralfamadore, his childhood and his life after the war; many of the scenes are steeped in black humour and it adds great variety to the novel.

It’s an amusing and deeply intriguing book, I think if I was to read it over again, I’d take even more from it. On this evidence, Vonnegut does appear to be a master of time and setting (in my opinion, controlling the setting and time is the most important aspect of fiction) just like Iain Banks, I think there are similarities in this book to Walking on Glass, despite Banks’ book being based on something completely different. Slaughterhouse-Five is also similar to my other favourite book, Catch-22, but not in way that I’d think it was a replication of Joseph Heller’s classic. I’ll be reading Slaughterhouse-Five again, it even has aliens.