A war and love story, following Frederic Henry, and American who joins WW1, working as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, on the Austrian front. Deployed there, he meets and falls and love with Catherine Barkeley, an English nurse, and their relationship deepens after he sustains a minor injury at the front.
Hemingway’s prose is infamously pithy. The novel is very sparse with description. Character exposition is mainly provided through dialogue. Details are provided when necessary though, and enough are present to create a deeper imaginary landscape than you would expect. This gives the book, as a whole, a very subdued beauty. It moves along at a steady pace, with not much happening at times, but then you start to engage with the image it puts in your head. It’s almost a magical effect.
The novel has a bleak outlook on war. War is a futile exercise, imposed upon the common man by powerful and stupid forces, and nothing good ever comes of it. War is death, destruction, and tragedy. No good can come of it, and nothing but meaningless sorrow emanates from it.
The dramatic structure of the novel is really that of a Tragedy. The characters are doomed to their fate. They can never be happy, no matter their efforts to try and secure their happiness. Some critics have decried the flatness of the love story. It is shallow. But this is also a reflection of the facsimile that our characters play. They try and create their romance as a means of escaping the tragedy of their circumstance, of trying to fight against their fate ; to no avail.
The perspective of the book is deeply rooted in the point of view of the main character. At times the perspective is a bit frustrating. Our main character doesn’t really have much of an opinion about anything, and shocking moments are narrated with the same subdued tone as tragic deaths. Perhaps this is to convey the mundanity of tragedy in war. Towns are smashed, comrades are injured, betrayed, die, all in a blink of an eye. There is no hope for a better future, only the everlasting bleakness of the present.
Certainly a capturing, although deeply sorrowful novel. The prose is frustratingly effective in its simplicity and subtlety.