Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #210498 in Books
• Published on: 1975-07-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 242 pages

Customer Reviews

A War With Meaning
Most writers about the First World War treat it as a war without values or meaning. David Jones - in what holds serious claim to be the literary masterpiece of that war - confounds this image by seeing meaning everywhere. In a richly-figured, highly poetic work (whether it's a novel or a poem is debatable) Jones reinterprets the realities of trench life with images drawn from religion and mythology, so that those fighting on both sides become pitched in refighting an endless war.

The details of the soldier's life are presented unsentimentally, with a more realistic sense of army life arising than one might find in more ostensibly tragic poets such as Owen or Sassoon. At the same time, the brutality of war is brilliantly evoked in the climactic battle scene. The modernist flourishes (much praised by T.S. Eliot) are an important dimension in Jones's craft here, but he taps more explicitly into British legends than Eliot or Pound, and the national element becomes especially important to a work that draws on Shakespeare's "Henry V" as a picture of Britons at war in France.

Seventy years after publication, "In Parenthesis" remains the best known literary work by a poet-painter who has remained little known outside a circle of faithful devotees. It's tempting to think that this is largely due to its emotional core, and the fact that it can still tell us a great deal about a conflict that has become almost exhausted by cliche.

Strange but powerful
Of all the books written after the first world war by those that fought in the trenches this is the oddest, quirkiest and strangest. At the same time it has a hypnotic power that by the end involves the reader in the sadness of fighting and dying. The sheer boredom that was the soldier's lot, the endless, mindless, waiting.... Its not a narrative. If you like a story this is not for you. If you like the power of words to transform your perceptions, then it is. Jones was without doubt a great poet; but his poetry is too idiosyncratic and too referenced to ever have a large or popular following. Be that as it may, it does not take away the quality of this work.