Vietnam still sells, especially when coupled to old publishing practices
Karl Marlantes's exceptional war novel proves that the traditonal book is far from dead, writes Robert McCrum

Robert McCrum ,(pic right), The Observer, Sunday 2 May 2010

From The Iliad to War and Peace, there's always been an audience for stories of men at arms. Some of the defining books of the last century – All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22 – are war stories.

For Americans, the tragedy of Vietnam yields The Quiet American, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and many unforgettable movies: Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter and Platoon. There was a moment when Hollywood scriptwriters seemed more at home in Da Nang than Main Street.

More than a generation has passed since the humiliating retreat from Saigon, but still the US wrestles with that historic trauma. Popular attention has been distracted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but deep in the nation's creative unconscious, the horrors of combat in the paddy fields have continued to fester.
Writers need time to negotiate an artistic rendezvous with the dark materials of battle. The hottest new novel in America today, Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, comes from a lifetime's struggle with the demons of memory, conscience and bereavement.
 

This Matterhorn is the codename for a fortified hilltop on which some Marines will encounter Armageddon.
Last week, stranded in New York by the volcano, I devoured Matterhorn, swept along by the spellbinding power of its narrative and the unforgettable picture it paints of a unit "shadowed by disease and madness" fighting an invisible enemy in the treacherous, misty jungle of the Vietnam highlands.

Once again, the reader is pitched back into the world of gooks and grunts, fragging and medevacs, squids and goons and the laconic profanities of the rock'n'roll war. Except that there is nothing drugged-up about Matterhorn. It is written in a quasi-documentary mood, by one who was there, and who has loaded all his experience into his hero's predicament.

Read McCrum's full piece at The Guardian online.