The Battle Raging: Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers's novel The Yellow Birds (puzzling title explained in epigraph) is an impressive and very short novel - close to a novella in some ways - at least half-way through. It's a war novel written with a great deal of sensitivity and insight, sometimes tripping over itself in its reach for meaningful, deep significance, but most of the time straightforward and clean and, in the best war-writing tradition, letting the events and the characters speak for themselves - leaving the conclusions and the philosophizing to us. Powers's story is a familiar one of war buddies, both from the South, one the experienced guy, meaning he's 21 and has been in the service for a few years (he's the narrator, Bartle, now looking back on events from the august age of 30), the other, Murphy, a new recruit at 18. Bartle takes on Murphy as a protege and friend; they end up in battle together, in one of the many small desert towns in northern Iraq; and, as we learn very early on so this is not a spoiler, Murphy doesn't make it out of the battle. The novel is about why and how that happened, how and whether Bartle failed him or just failed in general, and about the traumatic after-effects of war. Powers tells this story not in fragments but in narrative segments - chapters - arranged a-chronologically. The effect, then, is not of a linear narrative but of a narrative mosaic; this technique can be daunting and sometimes needlessly complex (think of K. Walford's fiction) - but Powers makes the arrangement of pieces work, and the picture slowly coheres over the course of the journey - probably simpler and more effective because the narrative itself spans only a few years (so far) - from Bartle's enlistment in about 2001 and his return from the war, a grizzled and shocked veteran, in about 2005. The battle scenes, which slowly accrue and Bartles spreads them out of the the course of the narrative (they are told in sequence, unlike the other pieces) are very tense, and his sense of character detail is fine: particularly memorable, when Bartle foolishly "promises" Murphy's mother that he'll watch out for her son and, in payment, his commanding Sgt. smacks him in the jaw; also, Bartles's awol night in Germany on the eve of his return to the States, a Joycean canter through a spooky nightttown. Can probably finish novel in two sittings, and am looking forward to continuing.