So many good reviews have been written about this book is
that I was puzzled to find it lacking in many ways.
It’s a first novel written by a young poet, and it contains
many of the elements of good poetry:
archetypes, vivid metaphors, wrenching themes, alternating stanzas that
lead us eventually to a final reveal, and a strong central voice. But for those reasons, it doesn’t quite hold
together as a novel. Archetypes, when
used in a longer narrative format, quickly become uninteresting stereotypes—for
example Sterling, the hard-bitten sergeant whom everyone agrees is the perfect
soldier. And we never get attached to the
younger soldier that the narrator has promised to protect (conveniently named
Murph, as if he were a cute, stuffed toy unable to hold his stitching intact in
a hostile environment).
So instead the book becomes an exploration of the soul of
its narrator, and succeeds on that level.
Its poetry reminds us that the young men we send into war are not
machines, not the brutal automatons that the army wants them to be, but young
people full of life and the urge to experience beauty and a sense of
purpose. As the narrator says of himself
and Murph while they’re getting ready to be deployed: “Being from a place where
a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life,
causes a unique kind of shame. We’d had
small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt
roads and small dreams. So we’d come
here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be.”
But a novel is not just the poetry of its language and the
insights of one narrative voice. And sometimes
the metaphors in this book stretch to the breaking point and beyond, as when
the narrator struggles for an image to describe what it’s like to fly home as
one of the survivors of a pointless war. His words are buffeted by so much turbulence
that the reader eventually loses the sense of what he’s saying or what the
character is thinking.
And we never get a sense of the day-to-day routine of
deployment in Iraq. Amongst all the
lovely metaphor, the book is strangely lacking in description. I felt that less poetry and more straightforward
narration would have served the story better.
Fortunately, the novel is short in length so that the reader isn’t asked
to stay involved with the characters too long.
And the disjointed narration lends truth to its overall message, presented
as a sudden insight the narrator has after going AWOL in Germany: “I realized, as I stood there in the church,
that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told,
and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d
ever figure out which was which.”
I can’t say I liked “The Yellow Birds” as much I expected to. And I find the high praise that critics and
other writers have given it to be more an expression of their guilt over not
condemning a war that was obviously unnecessary from the beginning, than a
clear-eyed look at the qualities of the book itself. Nevertheless, I think everyone should read it
in spite of its flaws, and take the opportunity to get inside a mind that’s
been battered and torn by war.
He is a poet - his writing is so lyrical, descriptive. I found myself rereading paragraphs just to soak it all in. I like the way he tells this very difficult story, moving back and forth between the war and coming home. Most of us can never know how this war felt to those who experienced it, and it's hard to take a clear, straight look at the war's effects on soldiers. He does a great job of conveying that in an almost heartbreaking narrative.
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