The Sergeant

by Dennis Murphy

The story of a strange struggle for a man's soul--of a lonely GI at a postwar army base in France, trapped between his unwilling attraction to a powerful and possessive older man and his idyllic love for a beautiful French girl.

254 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I mean, what sort of ending do you expect from a 1950s book about a tragically repressed military sergeant who becomes obsessed with a much younger, straight soldier, told from the perspective of the young soldier. I should have know better than to read this.

[Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I stayed up all night reading this. It's gripping, but I think Tom Swanson turns callous by the end. This novel shows the danger of not knowing yourself.

[Cecil · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy flowing, good read. Everybody isn't good, and every novel can't have a happy ending.

[Barry Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A risk with reading books that are 68 years old, especially those hyped as being `breakthrough’ when published, is that such themes have developed much over recent decades, which I must remember when reading the originals. I had seen the film about 30 years ago, so having found a copy of the book, I got around to reading it recently. I was impressed with the good structuring and pacing of the book. I found the lead character to be very unsympathetic, regardless of his sexuality; he abused his military rank to harass, bully, and groom with the intention of exploiting the Swanson character, half his age, and young enough to have been his son. While the loneliness and the lust of the Sergeantis well conveyed, the sympathy or willingness of Swanson to go along with the invitations to socialise with the Sergeant I found less convincing. As it is reported that Swanson was drafted, it seems strange that the three other people in his billet were all significantly older than him so, although he does not come across as a particularly sociable character – though when he had the chance he seemed to spend much of his out of hours time with his developing girlfriend in the city, he didn’t seem to have much of a peer group, youngsters of his own age which I would have thought conscription/the draft would have provided. The author may have used this to make the Swanson character more vulnerable and susceptible to the Sergeant's cultivation.

After having read the book, I found and watched the film on YouTube. John Phillip Law playing Swanson was 11 years older than the character in the book, so the age disparity isn’t as obvious in the film. Rod Steiger, as a 43-year-old, plays a 42-year-old. Although the author, Dennis Murphy, wrote the screenplay, in the film there wasn’t the timescale available to the book, of the Sergeant preventing Swanson from visiting his girlfriend for two months, and the petty tyranny exerted by the Sergeant over Swanson – ending the overnight passes, but pressuring Swanson to go socialising/drinking with him, for which Swanson was surprisingly forgiving, more than I expected and I found it somewhat implausible.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dennis Murphy's The Sergeant is a fairly standard combination of postwar military drama and neurotic character study. Sergeant Callan, a middle-aged, decorated WWII veteran arrives at an Army base in rural France in the early '50s. Disgusted by the CO's slack behavior, Callan makes a point of whipping his company into shape, with his harsh, humorless methods immediately triggering resentment among the enlisted men. But Callan takes a shine to young Private Swanson, first appointing him to comfortable office job, then taking him to the nearest village for drinks and companionship. At first the Private is alternately flattered and bewildered by the Sergeant's attentions, only to realize that they're becoming the laughingstock of the company. When the Sergeant punishes a veteran Private for drunkenness, and revokes Swanson's leave pass (disrupting his romance with a pretty French girl), Swanson realizes Callan's affection for him is more than comradely. Yes, this is one of those '50s novels about a repressed homosexual, who spends 200 pages agonizing over his sexuality, a few paragraphs trying to act on it and the remainder punishing himself for giving into his "weakness." Murphy's sparse prose and believable portrayal of barracks life make the book readable, and he tries to portray Callan as a sympathetic figure cursed by depression, trauma and loneliness, giving us occasional glimpses of tortured humanity behind the bluster. But since the bulk of the story is told through the eyes of Swanson, the unwelcome target of his affections, it undercuts most of our sympathy for the Sergeant. Considering this, and the time in which the story was written, there's only one way it can all end; and it might well be affecting if you haven't read or watched a hundred similar endings beforehand. Adapted into an overwrought 1968 film starring Rod Steiger and John Phillip Law.

[R Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book I picked up at a garage sale of mostly first editions of books from the 1950s. This one should have been a short story. Many pages of angst of the main character. Annoying excessive self reflection. Started skimming towards the end to get to the resolution that I predicted early on in the book. I guess it's a reflection of the time that it was written that it got a lot of attention because of the subject matter.