A S H Smyth
Flak Jacket to Dust Jacket
Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us about Conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22
By Christopher Coker
Hurst 325pp £25 order from our bookshop
My Life as a Foreign Country
By Brian Turner
Jonathan Cape 240pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
In Men at War, Christopher Coker, a professor of international relations at the LSE, picks over the last three thousand years of warfare in literature to see ‘what fiction tells us about war’s hold on the imagination of young men and the way it makes – and breaks – them’. From The Iliad to World War III, via the Napoleonic era, Dresden and Vietnam, Coker investigates five ‘personalities’ – ‘warriors’, ‘heroes’, ‘villains’, ‘survivors’ and ‘victims’ – and incorporates examples as diverse as Henry IV and Dr Strangelove, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Flashman novels.
Men at War does what surveys of this kind should always do: it sends you hurrying to (re)read the many dozens of books he refers to. Coker is extremely widely read and full of acute literary insights, wit and human sympathy. He has an especially frank and generous affinity for
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'McCarthy’s portrayal of a cosmos fashioned by God for killing and exploitation, in which angels, perhaps, are predators and paedophiles, is one that continues to haunt me.'
@holland_tom on reading Blood Meridian in the American west (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/devils-own-country
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/