The Thin Red Line by James Jones Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Thin Red Line
Book Review: The Only Anti-war Novel Ever Written for Grown-ups
Summary: 5 Stars
Nearly all anti-war novels are written at the intellectual level you find on display at college freshman rap sessions. "Gee, what would happen if they gave a war and no one showed up?" is the only message you'll get from Catch-22, Johnny Got His Gun and any others you can name. The Thin Red Line is the only anti-war novel with the intellectual and emotional heft that a serious thinker can enjoy.
The reason for this is that unlike other books that attempt to depict the horrors of war (which it does, by the way, better than any other novel I've read), James Jones understands the necessity and inevitability of war, even though he does not holdback from his readership the full horror of war. The result is a book like no other you'll read, one which brings you so closely to the cannon's mouth that you'll feel the humidity of the jungle, the sudden shift from calm to chaos, the friendships and the hatreds. Jones so captures the emotions of what it means to be a soldier, an American and a male that he is unparalled in American letters.
Book Review: Not bad if you like War Stories
Summary: 4 Stars
This is one of my first modern war books I read. It is about the invasion of Guadalcanal. But the story is so much more than the facts. The reader I think really gets to feel the blunt, ugly, horror of war. It would seem a soldier in WWII would feel the isolation and loneliness so far from home. Todays military features e-mail and access to information where ever you are. You have to wonder what kept many more of these soldiers from going insane. Sometimes I think the author could of developed his characters a little more, but the action in the book made for a lot of excitement.Book Review: Isolation of war
Summary: 4 Stars
When I read the Thin Red Line, I was impressed by the imagery and character development, but I found myself searchign for the theme of the novel. There is no lead character, so I wasn't sure what point of view I was being asked to take. Most of the characters are unlikeable, secretive and selfish. But then I began to realize that this was the theme of the novel. It's about what war turns men into. All of these men in a normal time and place would enjoy friends and families, they'd have hobbies and ambitions and would feel love and kindness, but the war has robbed them of their capacity to care about anyone but themselves.
Most war stories are about the way that war brings men together, bonds them in ways that peacetime can never equal, but there is no bonding in The Thin Red Line. They're all on their own, selfishly scrabbling for survival. A few characters do show signs of humanity, but their kindness leads only to disgrace, death or tagedy.
As for the movie, All I can say is that I enjoyed the military scenes, but nothing in the movie holds a candle to the novel. Each character in the novel is so vivid and fascinating, but in the movie many of the actors don't seem to have any idea how to bring that character to life. Nick Nolte is awesome. He's exactly like the novel character. But Adrian Brody is nothing at all like Fife.
Mostly I was annoyed by how wimpy the movie was. There are scenes of horror in the book that are treated in the movie bloodlessly. It would have been better not to include those scenes at all. For instance, theres a long passage where an unlucky soldier is badly wounded in the field and is screaming bloody murder. In the movie his screams motivate compassion, and people die trying to help him. In the novel people are motivated by disgust at his screams. His screams are looked on as major annoyances, and he is credited with destroying the company's morale. So people die trying to shut him up. That was a raw and horrific scene in the novel, and would have been amazing if they'd done it properly in the movie.
Anyway, this is not an enjoyable novel, but it was definitely well written and not the same old thing. I've never read another war novel that's anything like it.
Book Review: mission accomplished
Summary: 5 Stars
James Jones draws the title of this book from the "thin red line between the sane and the mad." But the subtitle gives a clearer sense of the theme - "every man fights his own war."
On the surface, The Thin Red Line is strikingly similar to The Naked and the Dead. Each novel tell the stories of a group of inexperienced soldiers sent as cannonfodder to fight the Japanese on a lonely Pacific island.
But under the surface, the novels could not be more different. Norman Mailer's novel uses the war as a vehicle to preach a message about hypocricy and corruption at the core of American culture. The soldiers, not really human to start with, are manipulated and degraded by the military machine.
The soldiers in The Thin Red Line face the same experiences as Mailer's characters. But Jones' characters are realistically human. They display independent thought (rational or not) and realistic emotions (alternately strained and dampened by the extremity and exhaustion of battle). Canny or confused, each one strives to make sense of the war and of his own responses. The theme of the book is the diversity of those responses. The last line sums it up: "One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way."
Mailer gives us subhuman characters cast as soldiers; Jones helps us appreciate the humanity that survives even in the most degrading circumstances.
Although this is a novel about characters, it does not let the reader get sentimentally attached to them. I appreciated the measure of emotional distance because otherwise the (sometimes graphic) death, destruction, and mayhem would have been painful to read.
Book Review: Excellent
Summary: 4 Stars
A superb look into the psyche of the fighting man in the Battle for control of the Pacific Islands. Fast moving, page turning adventure.