Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #778718 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 412 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Patricia Anthony's previous novels, from her 1993 debut with Cold Allies, were all SF with a disturbing grasp of alienness and dislocation. Flanders brings us close to another kind of alien--Travis Lee Stanhope, farmboy and scholar, a US volunteer among the strangely accented British soldiers of the Great War. He tells his story in eloquent, pungent letters to a brother at home, moving from the beauties of Spring in 1916 France to the dank hell of the trenches: mud, rats, lice, gas, foulness, death. Stanhope is highly rated as a sniper but for a while drinks excessively to blur the horror. His kindly captain is another poetry-quoting misfit, despised by other officers for his Jewishness. One fellow-solder fits in all too well, being so fond of killing that he doesn't stop at Germans; his murders have terrible repercussions for both Stanhope and the captain. Touches of fantasy or magic realism are supplied by visions of a good and tranquil place, a graveyard where Death is a lovely girl in calico and where one after another of Stanhope's slaughtered comrades and enemies walks through his dreams, peaceful at last. An extraordinary war novel, hauntingly sad but with glints of hope and humour too. -- David Langford

Synopsis
This novel is set during World War One. It features an American sniper serving in an English regiment, who has particularly lucid dreams of a world where his fallen comrades still exist, and he speaks to them and tries to ease their pain.

From the Back Cover
Last night while I was walking the graveyard alone, I heard someone singing...

Flanders, 1916: the British trenches grow wet and foul.

For Travis Lee Stanhope, an American volunteer - a sniper - in an English regiment, this is not hell but home. Each night he ventures into No-Man's Land and waits. At dawn, he begins the methodical and efficient killing of the enemy. His numbers are exemplary.

But the mud and blood are taking their toll. Travis's senses are ravaged by the unrelenting scream of shells, his mind numbed by too many rations of rum and his soul bled dry by the death that surrounds him. Yet in his dreams, something still lives.

In his dreams he walks amongst the still-living dead, friend and foe alike. Some lie at peace in glass-covered graves but others are stranded where they fell. He speaks to them. He tries to ease their pain.

But it will take more than dreams, more than death itself, before this young man comes to understand that, in this war to end all wars, he may have a purpose beyond killing.

Powerfully imagined, beautifully told and supremely affecting, Flanders is an extraordinary work of fiction that deserves to stand alongside Birdsong and The Regeneration Trilogy as a new classic of the Great War.

Customer Reviews

The book to end books...
The author and editors of this book should have thought twice before ranking it with the likes of Faulks, Barker or Remarque.
To begin with, the eyewitness annex letter-writing narrative just does not work. Who can explain to me how a 'writer of letters' (ie, the protagonist, ie the witness) could hope to get the impact of straight action across, as unavoidably and naturally he is forced to consider things in retrospect.
Not untypically, the reader will soon overlook this technique (as it misses any of its pretended impact altogether). Morerover, the literary motifs exhibited follow the same (hapless) line: the cemetery with the glass roof and the calico girl are bleak clichés, the emotional reflection conjured up along with these are far too explicit (read: by far not subdued enough) to work.
This author should have used for her benefit the impact of understatement, the only technique that can attempt to make some sense of the utter confusion and the shattering experience that war is on its participants.
Sorry to say, but this mediocre bit of novel just lacks any empathy, is blatantly over-repetitive, has a predictable ending and ditto protagontist's alter ego.
Any allusion on this book ranking with the top achievements is word play at best. The reader of 'this' Flanders (without the slightest touch of real-life couleur locale hinting at our region !) will find out the author teachers writing classes. Well... how about some...?
And, of course, the final (and fateful) letter to the homefront needs dating Xmas Eve 1916...
Just not worth it, not even the single star one is forced to give it.

One man coming to terms with the spirituality of war & death
Similair to Birdsong in its following of a young man in the the unbelievable carnage and madness of the trenches of World War One. The passage of the main character from idealistic young farmboy from America, looking for adventure in the battlefields of Europe; then the realisation that honour and courage are rare and sanity non existent as thousands of young men are desicrated in the low lying fields of Flanders. Hallucinatory images of the dead in a garden waiting for the journey that will take them to heaven, of how angels wait over and guard the fallen are how the soldier copes with the traumas and how he finds sanity amongst the insane.

Anthony captures the Flanders trenches!
It was touted as "the war to end all wars"! Young Texan Travis Lee Stanhope has volunteered to join a British regiment in the spring of 1916 for "a piece of adventure," he says. He soon re-defines his own idealism and discovers that instead of "acts of nobility" that "war is hell." Patricia Anthony in her novel "Flanders" vividly recounts this tragedy with a poetic sense of style--and justice.

The storyline depends upon a series of letters that Travis Lee writes to his younger brother, still at home in Harper, Texas. A crack sharpshooter, Travis tries to be assimilated into the ranks of his British comrades (despite the differences in the common language!) who have found themselves in the trenches in Flanders. He soon recognizes the sheer horror, depravity, uselessness, and stupidity of this war and turns to booze, unleashed sexual appetite, and even ritual violence. As the war is a tragedy (isn't there tragedy is all wars!), Anthony seems to have captured the essence of this one, from the muddy, bloody trenches themselves to the relationships between the soldiers, who seem to come in every shape and form.

As war itself is disquieting, so in "Flanders." It is not an easy book to read, nor to digest, but it is a book that is not easy to forget. Anthony's poetry loving (and reciting) Texan-among-the-Brits in far off Flanders fields is one character that's memorable.