Cold Mountain - a minority view

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Movie

“Cold Mountain,” leaves me - well, cold.

This first novel by Charles Frazier has been highly praised both as a novel and as a just-released movie. I haven’t seen the movie yet and I’m not sure I want to see it because I suspect it’s one of those “antiwar” movies that ends up giving young, would-be warriors, a rise.

But that’s a different issue tied in with the power of images and how much their reception depends on the nature of whose watching and why. I’ll deal with that later. Books have a different feel than movies and this one had me abandoning it in disbelief, and then picking it up again, wanting to find out what eventually happens.

Let me make a few things clear:

1. This is a cut above most novels today. It is not a simple adventure story. It is something that feels more like meaningful literature.

2. It goes where nothing else I have read about our Civil War goes - into the ugly, behind the lines story where men with a license to raid and kill apply that license indiscriminately and brutally. Civilians, including women and children, are the victims.

Most of what we read about the Civil War focuses on the terror faced by the soldiers in battle, or the incompetence (or in rare cases, competence) of the generals. In the end they comes out sounding heroic and glorify the carnage even while bemoaning it. And then there are the re-enactors. Why do they do this? Certainly it is not some form of war protest. But I have never heard of any group of amateur re-enactors trying to recreate the kind of behind-the-lines carnage we fine in Cold Mountain. I suspect Mr. Frazier has given us a look at a long-buried side of this most uncivil war.

And he speaks perceptively of why people go to war. At one point his hero reflects on this. Asking himself why he went to war, he decides it was an escape.. “The powerful draw of new faces, new places, new lives. And new laws whereunder you might kill all you wanted and not be jailed, but rather be docorated. Men talked of war as if they commited it to preserve what they had or what they believed. But Inman now guessed it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons. The endless arc of the sun, wheel of seasons. A war took a man out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else.”

I agree. Somewhere someone said something to the effect that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. They are prisoners, sleepwalking through life, drawing mental maps of escape. War offers such an escape. And excuse to do incredibly terrible, illogical things and look good doing it.

So what’s my problem here? Essentially, that it is the task of the novelist to either
give you a believable story, or to present the material in such a way that you are willing to suspend disbelief. In this case Frazier has created two protagonist, male and female, and tells their intertwined story by jumping back and forth, chapter-by-chapter, from one to the other. That’s a nice device that builds tension as you see the two moving inevitably towards one another despite significant obstacles put in their path.

Where the book fell down for me was I found the obstacles frequently hard to believe. Inman, the male protagonist, runs into people and situations, over and over again, that I found difficult to accept. It’s not that I don’t think there was this sort of thing going on - it’s that I don’t expect one man on his journey - his odyssey really - to encounter so many of them. The situations felt contrived to me - in some cases to the point of cliché - and the minor characters felt more like caricatures - cartoons of real people.

At least one of the heroe’s narrows escapes with death is simply an old routine, so predictable under the circumstances, that I just had a tired been-there-done-that, feeling. The challenge of the novelist is to put the hero into situations that look unsolvable, then solve them in ways we don’t expect. The solution in this case was exactly what I would expect.

I found myself much more interested in the female protagonist. She was more believable to me and her problems more original. Though I felt at times the author simply had some arcane knowledge of the minutia of life in a rural town in the 1860s that he wanted to share and so made the plot give him an opportunity to share this information. These kind of details were interesting to me, but at the same time slowed things down and I suspected inaccuracies in a couple of places, but have not bothered to pursue it to see if my suspicions are true. Suffice it to say, that I found these details interesting to a point, but then tumbling over into distraction where they broke me out of the story,.

There is a second female who plays a dominant role in the book and she stretched my credibility to the limit. She was the noble savage, who essentially raised herself and turns out to be incredibly savvy about all sorts of things. Were she 40 I might have believed she had accumulated all the knowledge she displays. But she’s half that age and her extensive “street wise” knowledge is just a bit much for me.

All that aside, the novel had enough appeal to make me keep reading to the end - and that was my final complaint. I didn’t like the ending. And once more, despite the skill of the author, I felt I saw it coming. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve read too much - seen too many movies.

So what do we have here? A much-praised first novel about an unusual aspect of the Civil War. It gives you insight into the brutality of modern war and its impact on civilians. But it does so with people and events that I, at least, found barely believable.

As to the issues of war and peace - I’ve given up on this sort of story - especially when retold by Hollywood - ever serving to really encourage peace. Translate this to the screen and inevitably the thoughtful - though-provoking - aspects of the book will get lost and the focus will switch to action and the realistic display of violence. Just watching the television ads for the movie, this seems obvious. But that’s the nature of the medium.

What happens is a curious phenomenon associated with the imprecision of images as a communications tool. It seems the bigger slice of reality we serve up, the more likely it is that people will view things in their own way. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but as authors we don’t get to choose them. So an image or a situation that might offend or disgust me, will actually turn on the surpressed “war lover” in another person. Anthony Swofford says this so well in “Jarhead,” his no-holds-barred account of what it was like to be Marine sniper in the first Gulf War.

Near the start Swofford provides this blunt account of the impact of movies on young soldiers who themselves anticipate going to battle shortly. Upon learning that they are about to be in a war, he and his buddies rent several movies and watch them one after another. Here’s how he describes the experience.

“There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twenty Nine Palms Marine Corps base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the film celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar - the actual killers who know how to use the weapons ar e not.”

Sometimes I think war is simply our way of shaking our fist at God - telling Him that we’re not at all happy with things as they were created and we’ll demonstrate our frustration by smashing all our toys. But I can’t live with that view of life. I have to opt for a more optimistic one - and when I do that, Cold Mountain comes up short. Some - I assume most - will say its simply realistic and I don’t want to face reality. But then, that was my main complaint as I read it - I kept falling out of the world the author was trying to draw me into. The novelist tries to lure us into suspending disbelief - but in Cold Mountain, I just couldn’t take the bait. I disbelieved.

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