Book Reviews - Review 73

A brief novel describing the experiences of US soldier Billy Pilgrim as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. There are also jumps to Billy's later life as a husband, father, optometrist and exhibit in an alien zoo - jumps that take place owing to Billy's having come somehow "unstuck in time". He is an everyman, or, to put it another way, a nobody: physically weak, intellectually average, morally irresolute. But he is a survivor, an innocent onlooker as both fellow Americans and - during the bombing of Dresden - Germans are senselessly slaughtered around him.

The aliens who abduct him reveal to Billy that time does not really run in the way that humans experience it, but that - at least to them, the Tralfamadorians - each moment exists eternally and can be visited and revisited. Everything is determined in advance: there is no free will, but rather we are all "the listless playthings of enormous forces".

The chief aim of the book is to convey the sheer horror and senselessness of war as it is experienced by those in the thick of it: that all war can ever teach is the value of peace. It's a strange mixture of exuberant wackiness, sardonic wit, humanity and grim pessimism. A chilling, funny and moving read.