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Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2008 > May > 03 > Entry
a war story
“Peace,” by Richard Bausch, (Knopf, 171 pages, $23).
Dramatic tension is the lifeblood of the novel. Writers who can build it and artfully sustain it provide pleasure for their readers with nervous friction that thrills us.
Richard Bausch employs the ultimate tension-building device in “Peace,” his latest novel. It is the winter of 1944 and Cpl. Robert Marson is a member of a U.S. Army patrol in Italy. The tide has turned in World War II as “the Italians had quit, and the Germans were retreating, engaging in delaying actions, giving way slowly, skirmishing, seeking to make every inch of ground costly in time and in blood.”
Marson takes two men on a reconnaissance patrol to the top of a hill to see what the Germans are doing. They are being guided by an elderly Italian man who was driving a farm cart along the road. The hillside is heavily wooded, and freezing rain is pouring down. The troops are miserable as they struggle to climb it.
Night falls. The weather worsens, and the soldiers realize the hillside is a mountain. Their guide is acting suspiciously so they don’t trust him. Exhausted, the four men try to snatch a few hours sleep.
It starts snowing. Their trek up the mountainside becomes a ghastly ordeal in blizzard conditions. Joyner, a profane southerner, wants to turn back. The third G.I. is Asch, a Jew from Boston.
These men have been thrown together on this hazardous mission. Marson doesn’t care for Joyner. “They did not particularly like each other. There had been tension between them before. Joyner had a set of attitudes about Negroes, Jews and Catholics, and his assertions, along with the obscenity of his speech in general, had an unpleasant air of authority about them.”
As the men battle the elements and argue with one another, they remember what their lives were like before the war. Marson thinks about the wine they drank in Palermo before they went into combat. An Italian boy named Mario located some fine wines that had been hidden from the Germans.
“Marson had knowledge about wine because his father had taught him. The old man, Charles, also brewed his own beer, and in the summer of 1929, when Marson was 12, the workmen building houses in Piqua, Ohio, where the family then lived, would come to the door of the house and say to his mother, ‘Mrs. Marson, do you think we could have a little of Charles’s cold home brew?’ “
Marson’s thoughts drift back to his days as a baseball player. He thinks of his wife and wonders if he will see her again. They finally reach the top of the mountain and they discover that the Germans are nearby. Tension builds as the impending threat of violence becomes as smothering as the snowdrifts that threaten to engulf them.
A sniper can kill before you hear the shot. “Peace” has the sizzling impact of a sniper’s round. Bausch doesn’t waste words or bullets.
You won’t know what hit you.
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