OPERATION UPPERCUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 15

OPERATION UPPERCUT

THE STRANGE LAND, by Ned Calmer; Joncthan Cape, Enéglish price, 12/6. SUPPOSE it is inevitable that» this novel will be compared with The Naked and the Dead, if only because its account of the GI at war in Germany balances Norman Mailer’s picture

of Pacific fighting. The parallels are actually much closer than that. It almost seems as if Ned Calmer has tried to out-Mailer Mailer-without the obscenity. But these characters are not very articulate about anything except the fighting (Mailer’s; book was as much about politics as war) and Calmer has neither the saturnine laughter nor honesty of insight of his predecessor. The scheme of telling the story through the minds of twelve characters is ambitious but unwieldy, and the subterfuges the author has to use at times to explain the course of the battle through Clare Drake’s or General Mallon’s stream of consciousness aren’t always convincing. There is a gain in vividness and compactness through limiting the action to the six days of Operation Uppercut-a mishandled attack on the Siegfried Line -and the descriptions of the fighting and the build-up to battle are very good. The occasional Jew-baiting, the nascent Fascism, the blood and dirt and sex are all here, but there is a rawness about. the book as a whole: Mallon is a figure of melodrama, and so is the war correspondent John C. Wexel. Calmer’s bitterness and anger are expressed so nakedly that they distort the novel's reality rather than intensify it.

P.J.

W.