War and Remembrance

With War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk cements himself as one of my favourite novelists of the 20th century. Despite this, I struggle to explain what makes his writing, and in turn this novel, such a standout for me. His prose is workmanlike, his plotting can meander, and he can get bogged down in superflous detail. However, what Wouk has created in his saga of the Henry Family and their experiences in World War 2 is nothing less than a Homerian epic chronicling the great global and cultural transformations the Second World War wrought.

He breathes life into every player of the drama, from Simon Anderson, who is given less than 30 pages across the duology's combined 2000 to chronicle his involvement in the Manhattan Project, to towering historical figures like FDR and Josef Stalin. At times, with this vast cast weaving in and out of each other's narratives, War and Rememberance begins to feel like a drama crafted in the oral tradition, emerging from some primordial unconcious and shared to it's reader after centuries of refining its episodes.

This is Wouk's greatest feat in constructing this novel, his understanding that the readership encountering it would likely remember the broad strokes of the war, and the clever ways he uses the audience's foreknowledge to mount anticipation for what comes next. War and Remembrance. It's right there on the tin.