Dan Wylie’s mother rescues animals left behind after farm murders — the Labrador cowering under the bed, soaked in the blood of its octogenarian owners who were slaughtered in their sleep, the cockatoo that can’t stop hopefully saying “hello, hello” long after its people are gone. Set in the dying days of the old Rhodesia, amid the brutality and futility of a war almost done with, the animal suffering threaded throughout the book — the scrawny brown dog being thrashed by schoolboys, the slow hippopotamus shot in sport that turns out to be carrying a slippery little foetus — stands out as most poignant.
Wylie’s writing about his own suffering and that of his fellow conscripts in this “fairly closely autobiographical book” is like an assault, unrelenting, unfiltered, perhaps best read a few pages at a time.
The narrator is 18, a confused white boy kitted out by the army right down to razors and underpants, trying desperately to forge something useful out of the horror by turning his experience into literature.
As a portrayal of psychological torture, of programming, it is initially very powerful: brainwashed young men are systematically made to submit to gratuitous authority, turned into soldiers “taught to pass on the fury of our many defeats” on to an enemy lined up by the state, subjugated, their pride coming to reside in polished belt brasses and neatly made beds.
But the early smattering of one too many adjectives turns into a flood, and it is as if the writer is trying to squeeze his entire vocabulary on to the page, alternately pretentious and clichéd, all honesty drowning in words.
A porcine straw-hatted American poses for his red-lipped wife’s camera, lions loll in forbidding tawny repose and elephants have ageless calm. Architect Mies van der Rohe is quoted — beauty is in the details — and there are endless literary and other academic references that slow down the text.
It is a shame, because while the particulars of his ordeal are long past, and while this kind of self-pitying introspection can be irritating, Wylie comes up with original and gut-wrenching images, and his experience does speak to all young people everywhere drafted into wars they don’t necessarily believe in — as well as to those frustrated by being forced to submit to an unjust pecking order and a crude line of authority in any sphere.