Daniel Mason

After some very rough going on the first day of reading Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier (2018), I've come around and beginning to like this novel or at least shake my head in wonder at the incredible research he's done for this historical fiction - about a medical student who volunteers to serve w the Austrian army in the First World War. We get through Mason's vivid description of the horrors of medical care in that time and in remote wartime conditions - and it's probably best to just accept this as a work of historical fiction and not worry about the niceties of plot, character, or dialog. Mason doesn't wear his research lightly but the end result - ok I'm not even at the halfway point so who knows? - is that this novel gives us a better sense of life on the ground in that time and place than any work of nonfiction could provide. The account of daily life and care and survival and more often death in the remote military hospital where the physician/protagonist (Lucious) learns surgery by trial and error is almost painfully gruesome but has the feeling of veracity. As to what will happen in the remaining two-thirds of the novel - more of the same? Or will it become a romantic wartime drama, Lucius and the nurse, Margarete, who is of course a nun? - I can't yet determine, but I'll stay w it for now.

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