Beautifully Written, Painful to Read

Title: The Yellow Birds
Author: Kevin Powers

From the publisher's book description:
'"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city... Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.'

Insights and Telling Details

+ Joanne summed up the power of this novel precisely: "We've all read war stories, but none like this." The reality of modern combat is disturbing, horrifying, and not what we think. There is no down time. Just constant slaughter without purpose, taking and retaking the same city over and over again.
+ Powers' narrative style is deeply moving and his way with metaphor is powerful and strange. The military jargon is a little daunting to the civilian, but looking up the terms used solves the problem.
+ A few of our readers confessed to not fully understanding the plot. Why is he arrested? For writing the letter? Ultimately we decided the reason was contained in the text: somebody had to be held to account for the death of the soldier.
+ The story moves back and forth in time. While some felt that a chronology would help the reader, others appreciated this method for the way in which it supports the story., The narrator, as he tries to make sense of it all, is never truly in one place without being in the other. It's a sophisticated narrative style, where time is disjointed and disclosure is partial.
+ Steve was celebrating the new life of his grandchild while reading this at night. The experience, he said, was "hard, hard, hard."
+ The narrator struggles to understand, but he never judges. "Eventually, I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as absence of accountability."
+ Two of our number say this book affected them more than anything else they're read about war. With some of the best writing we've ever experienced, The Yellow Birds is a surprising, tender, brutal book. We recommend it, with reservations because of its grim power. The reader is a participant in this war. This is no distant history. We are still living it.

A Man Whose Power Is in the Half Light

Title: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
Host: Steve

Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Price and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wolf Hall is a new telling of life under King Henry VIII during that moment when he chooses to divorce his queen of 20 years and marry Anne Boleyn. Mantel chooses Thomas Cromwell as her central character and the fulcrum around which the future of England teeters.

Insights and Telling Details

Between snow-birding, head colds, and conflicts, our group was perhaps the smallest ever, with only four attendees. Wolf Hall earned rave reviews from all four.

Wine and lovely things by the fire.

+ Mantel's prose is often hard to follow, as dialogue is frequently attributed to "he" despite the presence of many "him's" in the room on the page. But there is a rhythm to it, and you figure it out after awhile. The prose is so beautiful, you don't really mind.

+ Mantel redefines Thomas Cromwell from the way he is usually portrayed in history, as she does Thomas More, the utopian thinker whose ready resort to torture hardly made him a "man for all seasons." As well, King Henry VIII comes across as surprisingly sympathetic (ruthless in pursuit of his goals, but also needy, witty, funny and fun-loving).

+ Steve found the portrayal of the cardinal particularly delightful and we all appreciated how Mantel used dialogue to develop her characters and their relationships.

+ Mantel brings history alive, animating historical figures into flesh and blood. The group marveled at the depth of the author's research and her extraordinary presentation of detail, giving the reader a glimpse into the history, society and life of the time.

+ Violence and brutal poverty in a rigid social structure highlight just how close to primitive life was in those times.

+ The gruesome details about what's actually involved with hair shirts and burning someone at the stake were a bit hard to take, like the story of the supposedly heretical grandmother whose family and friends come the day after her burning to retrieve her bone fragments and skull.

+ Everyone appreciated the portrait of Cromwell, whose competence, self-restraint, and calculating pragmatism (often generous, but always with a purpose) made him a fascinating character. We noted how he would remind himself to "adjust his face" to disguise his true thoughts and how he withheld information about his story so that his mysterious background would make him a more formidable foe. "A man's power is in the half light."

+ A good half of our group had already read well into the next volume of this series by the time of the meeting, not wanting to say goodbye to Cromwell or Henry.