Book Reviews - Review 8

Despite having had its reliabilty and objectivity thrown into question since publication, this is still probably the most famous British memoir of the First World War. Its virtues are a readable, unstuffy style; the blunt candour that the author applies to himself and to his experiences; and a lot of informative content about the specifics of warfare.

If his account is to be believed, Graves was a fine soldier: tough, decisive, compassionate, and prepared to stand his ground in the face of fools. Nonetheless, he underwent a nervous breakdown a year before the war ended, from which it took him years to recover - if, in fact, he recovered completely at all. In the second part of his life Graves mostly shunned human business, setting himself up in the Mallorcan mountains as a novelist, off-beat literary theorist and poet.

The autobiography ends immediately before the author's move to Mallorca: by his own account, the point at which "life" for him as a dialogue with the outside world drew to a close. Though the majority of the book covers his war experiences, there are also pithy, opinionated descriptions of his miserable school days at Charterhouse, and of his postwar experiences as a student, husband, father, shopkeeper, and lecturer at an Egyptian university.

For me the most striking feature of the war descriptions is their matter-of-factness - their military terseness. The accounts of squalor, carnage and chaos are all neutral and unemotive, so that the report of Graves' breakdown, when it comes, is surprising and difficult to trace back to the preceding narrative. Clearly, suppression of emotion was the only way of coping with events, and perhaps Graves did experience them - at least consciously - as neutrally as he describes them here.

Above and beyond its account of the Great War, perhaps this book's main success is in conveying so vividly the character of its author: ingenious, stoic, self-absorbed, and always, perhaps, a little bit crazy.