Prisoners of War: The Yellow Birds

Like any great tragedy, there is a unity of time, place, and action in Kevin Powers's excellent war novel and debut novel, The Yellow Birds, and I'm not holding it to the strict Aristotelian criterion of the unity of a single day - too strict a boundary for the modern world - but the novel does focus on one action that occurred over the course of just a few days during a battle in northern Iraq - and on the effects of this dreadful battle; and it's very tight because it also focuses on only three main characters (there are secondary characters and bit players, too): Bartle (the Melville echo is obvious), the narrator who suffers the consequences of his own actions and those of others; his army buddy, Murph, who loses his mind after witnessing some gruesome battle and needless death and goes walking into the enemy-held village, barefoot and naked, and his company goes into the village, heavily armed, to bring him back; and finally their sergeant, the ironically named Sterling, who as we learn right away is a madman. Won't spoil the ending, but let's just say that Sterling and Bartle fail miserably in their rescue mission and though you'd expect Bartle to take it harder - he's the sensitive and observant narrator while Sterling is the tough and veteran (though only a few years older) who has shown he can be cruel and ruthless; but it's Sterling who blows his own head off, in despair about how they failed, and it's Bartle who pays for the failure - killing of innocent Iraqi civilians and destroyed a mosque and minaret - with time in military prison. But obviously all three live in despair, and only Bartle, Ishamael-like, lives to tell the tale. Very powerful war novel; though it's on familiar ground there's not a cliche in the whole book, and some very striking scenes throughout, building to the climax when at last we learn what exactly happened to Murph, how and why he died. Some may find his ghostlike wandering through the maze of the small town to be over the top, overly cinematic, if not operatic - I found it plausible and suitably weird. I did find Powers's prose at times over the top, straining too hard for meaning - but only rarely, most of the time I was with him 100 percent. It's a very humor-less book, quite the opposite of ironic war novels like Catch-22; Yellow Birds is just dark and brutal, suitable for our times, for these times.