War and Remembrance

With War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk cements himself as one of my favourite novelists of the 20th century. Despite this, I struggle to explain what makes his writing, and in turn this novel, such a standout for me. His prose is workmanlike, his plotting can meander, and he can get bogged down in superflous detail. However, what Wouk has created in his saga of the Henry Family and their experiences in World War 2 is nothing less than a Homerian epic chronicling the great global and cultural transformations the Second World War wrought.

He breathes life into every player of the drama, from Simon Anderson, who is given less than 30 pages across the duology's combined 2000 to chronicle his involvement in the Manhattan Project, to towering historical figures like FDR and Josef Stalin. At times, with this vast cast weaving in and out of each other's narratives, War and Rememberance begins to feel like a drama crafted in the oral tradition, emerging from some primordial unconcious and shared to it's reader after centuries of refining its episodes.

This is Wouk's greatest feat in constructing this novel, his understanding that the readership encountering it would likely remember the broad strokes of the war, and the clever ways he uses the audience's foreknowledge to mount anticipation for what comes next. War and Remembrance. It's right there on the tin.

When I started The Winds of War, I told myself I wasn't going to get so invested that I went on to War and Remembrance. Where the action had significantly picked up at the end of book one, I found myself not only invested, be eager to read book two. The beginning of the book maintained the faster pace that concluded the previous and I was ecstatic. However, this is still a 1000+ page book. It slowed down again. While consistently interesting, it is long.    Picking up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the book continues to follow the members of the Henry family (Pug, Rhoda, Warren, Byron, and Madeline) as well as Byron's wife Natalie and their son Louis, her uncle Aaron Jastrow, Pamela Tudsbury, and a few others. Each of them is facing a different aspect of the war: Pug, Byron, and Warren in the Pacific, Natalie, Louis, and Aaron in Europe evading the Nazis at all costs, and Rhoda and Madeline on the Homefront. Their circumstances offer unique perspectives of war to the pages, perhaps most profoundly Aaron Jastorw's ‘A Jew's Journey' facing antisemitism and the Holocaust.    Like The Winds of War, there are multiple mediums of writing that discuss the characters' lives as well as general World War II history. Both are interesting, but having them side by side in a single narrative breaks the flow of storytelling immensely. While the characters are in 1943, the next chapter can talk about the end of the war — events that the characters have yet to experience. I found it distracting and sometimes frustrating.    Another issue I have is with the way the book is organized. Even though the book is broken up into different parts and names the key event of that section, most of the time a majority of the chapters are not even focused on the characters named or the situation highlighted. The narrators are inconsistent, and despite having spent so much time reading, there are still some characters that made such a brief appearance that I had no idea who they were and why they were suddenly telling the story from their point of view. Other instances left characters completely abandoned, such as Janice Henry and for the most part, Madeline, who may as well have not existed at all. I didn't find much purpose to her character in the first book and she had even less of a purpose in this book. Her life gets put together in the background with little reference to book one.    My complaints aside, I do think this is a wonderful work of historical fiction. The writing is thorough as well as the research, and though it makes for chaotic storytelling, it is interesting that the book covers so many different aspects of life during the war right down the the strain on families. I wish it spent a little less time on the ‘romances', as the characters have such little room to develop strong personalities and a rapport with the reader, but I digress. Given the time the book was written and published, the length of both of the books is not surprising with all the research that had to have been collected. If someone plans on only reading one work of World War II fiction, this would be the one I would suggest for the history factor alone. It's above all an informative read even for someone well-versed in this time period.