Reviewed by Randy Rosenthal
“How can you kill people,” Tolstoy asked in his The Kingdom of God Is Within You, “when it is written in God’s commandments, ‘Thou Shall Not Murder?’” In that obscure but incredibly influential book, Tolstoy writes that anyone who professes themselves to be a Christian cannot practice or support violence in any form, and that anyone with even a light understanding of the basic tenets of Christianity knows it is a disgrace that wars have been blessed by the Church for centuries. Even recently, a so-called born-again Christian president of the United States chose to take an eye for an eye, rather than turn his other cheek. This theme of religious hypocrisy in regards to war is what John Boyne, celebrated novelist of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, tackles in his new novel, The Absolutist. For whatever the book may be considered—if it’s taken as a historical novel or gay literature—it is an anti-war book over anything else.
It’s 1919. World War One is over and twenty-one year old Tristan Sadler travels from London to Norwich in order to deliver a packet of letters to the sister of the man who trained and fought with Tristan during the war, Will Bancroft. In chapters that alternate between Tristan’s visit to Norwich and his experiences during the Great War—his time in boot camp and in the trenches of France— Boyne reveals that Tristan has been keeping deep secrets, and that his visit to Bancroft’s sister Marian is about more than a simple delivery of letters.
During training at Aldershot, Will and Tristan meet a boy (they’re all boys, seventeen and eighteen) named Wolf. Wolf declares that he does not believe in fighting. Thinking Wolf a coward, the group calls him “a feather,” the non-official nickname for men who refuse to become soldiers, or for soldiers who refuse to fight, which at that time was a serious crime, punishable by execution. “Feathers” are ostracized from society, and so though almost everyone does not like war, except the pathological, everyone has to shut their mouth and participate in it. Boyne does a masterful job at depicting how closed-minded British society was during the war; anyone who expresses unconventional ideas, especially regarding war or sex, is maliciously treated as a traitor and enemy. We go to fight for freedom abroad, Marian says, but do little to defend freedom at home.
The problem, Boyne implies, is that hardly anyone is brave enough to think for themselves in wartime. It’s much simpler to call a conscientious objector a coward, because otherwise it means that everything society is doing is wrong. Wolf explains to his comrades that he simply doesn’t “believe that it is right to take another man’s life in cold blood.” He admits that of course there are political issues at stake, but reminds his peers that “there is also such a thing as diplomacy, there is such a thing as the concept of right-thinking men gathering around a table and sorting their problems out.” Wolf doesn’t believe that the diplomatic approach has been thoroughly tried, and logically does not want to take part in “killing each other day after day after day.” For this wise and pragmatic stance, Wolf is killed by his own peers, before they are shipped to France.
Wolf’s murder has a startling impact on Will Bancroft and Tristan, who have become intimate; “friends,” according to Will, but Tristan would say they were something more. But Tristan can’t speak about “this other thing,” because it’s one thing for someone like Wolf to be a pacifist, which is enough of a disgrace in itself, but it’s quite another to be gay in a time and place that holds homosexuals in contempt, as if they were the embodiment of evil. Therefore, Will and Tristan can’t talk about their intimacy, though they do talk about Wolf’s death, which Tristan refuses to believe was murder. “Do you mean to tell me that you think they’re not capable of it?” Will asks him, “What have we been trained for, after all, if not for killing other soldiers? The colour of the uniform doesn’t matter much.”
Though after months in the trenches, Tristan comes to agree that indeed it “scarcely matters” whose heads bombs are dropping on, since “the sooner everyone’s killed, the sooner it it’s all over,” he does not join Will Bancroft in forming and becoming convicted of pacifist principles. In the midst of gruesome descriptions of trench warfare, which are some of Boyne’s most powerful passages, Tristan comments on how taking the German trench was “an important victory for Good over Evil,” apparently without irony. In order to carry on, Tristan allows himself to “become immune to the random acts of violence” that make up the everyday of war. Here, it’s hard not to see parallels with society’s view of war in general; if we weren’t immune to the violence of war, then we wouldn’t condone it. Especially when Marian Bancroft points out the curiosity of “how we consider the death of a soldier to be a source of pride rather than a source of national shame.” As Tristan continues to tell Marian about her brother’s last days, it becomes clear that he did not travel to Norwich to give her a pack of letters, but to make a confession.
The war progresses, and Will gets himself into trouble by expressing that he “no longer believed in the moral absolute of this war, that he felt the army was engaged in tactics which are contrary to the public good and God’s laws.” What is shocking is not the violent reaction to Will’s principle, but that everyone else who thinks themself civilized does not also profess the same principle. After all, much of the law code of Western Civilization is based on the Ten Commandments, which as Tolstoy reminds us, number six states Thou Shall Not Kill. Tolstoy also reminds us that there are no amendments to this commandment that approve murder in the context of war, or any other extenuating circumstance. Moreover, the basis of Christ’s teaching, and indeed what sets Christianity apart from Judaism, is the teaching to “resist not evil” and turn the other cheek. The currency of our secular nation declares its trust in God, and the less secular nations of Europe and the developed world have the Church backing their foundation and authority. What should then be surprising is not that a few brave soldiers here and there refuse to participate in war, but that society as a whole has not abandoned war centuries ago.
It is this point, among others, which caused Tolstoy to be excommunicated, and it is this point that John Boyne has placed at the core of his powerful and moving new novel, which is sure to win several awards. The Absolutist needs to be read, for society always needs to be reminded that war and civilization are mutually exclusive, and that if we still have war, then we’re not yet civilized.
Other Press
July 2012
