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Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22
Since Achilles first stormed into our imagination, literature has introduced its readers to truly unforgettable martial characters. In Men at War, Christopher Coker discusses some of the most famous of these fictional creations and their impact on our understanding of war and masculinity. Grouped into five archetypes-warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims-these characters range across 3000 years of history, through epic poems, the modern novel and one of the twentieth century's most famous film scripts.
Great authors like Homer and Tolstoy show us aspects of reality invisible except through a literary lens, while fictional characters such as Achilles and Falstaff, Robert Jordan and Jack Aubrey, are not just larger than life; they are life's largeness-and this is why we seek them out. Although the Greeks knew that the lovers, wives and mothers of soldiers are the chief victims of battle, for the combatants, war is a masculine pursuit. Each of Coker's chapters explores what fiction tells us about war's appeal to young men and the way it makes- and breaks-them. The existential appeal of war too is perhaps best conveyed in fictional accounts, and these too are scrutinized by the author.
Great authors like Homer and Tolstoy show us aspects of reality invisible except through a literary lens, while fictional characters such as Achilles and Falstaff, Robert Jordan and Jack Aubrey, are not just larger than life; they are life's largeness-and this is why we seek them out. Although the Greeks knew that the lovers, wives and mothers of soldiers are the chief victims of battle, for the combatants, war is a masculine pursuit. Each of Coker's chapters explores what fiction tells us about war's appeal to young men and the way it makes- and breaks-them. The existential appeal of war too is perhaps best conveyed in fictional accounts, and these too are scrutinized by the author.
325 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
8 people are currently reading
193 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Coker
55 books15 followersChristopher Coker was a British political scientist and political philosopher who wrote extensively on war.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 28, 2022
Was very excited to read this but it was very difficult to follow at times. I certainly enjoyed the chapters with characters and story lines I knew. Not very well written either. Sentences that just didn't make sense.
January 6, 2017
When I committed to reading Men at War and began it, I thought it was literary criticism. I wasn't familiar with Christopher Coker and assumed a study of fiction about war through its characters must be the work of a literary critic. Neither of my initial ideas were right. The book is a study of the nature of war through its effect on men represented in the fiction we read. Christopher Coker himself is described in another book as a "philosopher of war." He calls himself a social scientist and his goal to help understand the existential reality of war as it's re-imagined in fiction.
Coker's study looks at characters in war through 5 archetypes: warriors, heroes, villains, survivors, and victims. He writes in detail about 25 works of fiction representing these character types. The fiction he writes about spans all of military history, from Troy to World War II, and characters as diverse as Achilles, Falstaff, and Blood Meridian's Judge Holden, works ranging from The Iliad to Slaughterhouse-Five. But his subject is war as an elemental trait in politics among nations. He uses such subjects as Achilles and Dr Strangelove to illustrate all this and the effects on men. I know that Coker believes war to be an innate part of being human, coded in our evolutionary past. "Humanity and war are joined at the hip and it is most unlikely as a species we are done with war yet," he writes.
But in the end Coker does give us insightful glosses of the works and characters he chooses as archetypes. I haven't read all the fiction he glosses. However, I recognize he writes knowledgeably enough about those I'm familiar with that I respect what he says about the works as fiction. The farther I read in the book the more I thought him accomplished as a reader of character and the books they inhabit.
The book closes strongly. In his summing-up he acknowledges that though his book studies men at war the voices particularly missed are those of women. He writes that women are the chief victims of war, wives and mothers left behind to become collateral damage through the loss of their men. It's no surprise that women have often been seen in literature as checks on their men at war.
A negative property of the book is that it's marred by many typos and misspellings. There are even instances where I felt words had been inadvertently left out. I thought this unusual for a book from Oxford University Press, an imprint I associate with books of high physical quality.
Coker's study looks at characters in war through 5 archetypes: warriors, heroes, villains, survivors, and victims. He writes in detail about 25 works of fiction representing these character types. The fiction he writes about spans all of military history, from Troy to World War II, and characters as diverse as Achilles, Falstaff, and Blood Meridian's Judge Holden, works ranging from The Iliad to Slaughterhouse-Five. But his subject is war as an elemental trait in politics among nations. He uses such subjects as Achilles and Dr Strangelove to illustrate all this and the effects on men. I know that Coker believes war to be an innate part of being human, coded in our evolutionary past. "Humanity and war are joined at the hip and it is most unlikely as a species we are done with war yet," he writes.
But in the end Coker does give us insightful glosses of the works and characters he chooses as archetypes. I haven't read all the fiction he glosses. However, I recognize he writes knowledgeably enough about those I'm familiar with that I respect what he says about the works as fiction. The farther I read in the book the more I thought him accomplished as a reader of character and the books they inhabit.
The book closes strongly. In his summing-up he acknowledges that though his book studies men at war the voices particularly missed are those of women. He writes that women are the chief victims of war, wives and mothers left behind to become collateral damage through the loss of their men. It's no surprise that women have often been seen in literature as checks on their men at war.
A negative property of the book is that it's marred by many typos and misspellings. There are even instances where I felt words had been inadvertently left out. I thought this unusual for a book from Oxford University Press, an imprint I associate with books of high physical quality.
January 4, 2018
I'm sure there are people that would enjoy this book, but I struggled getting through it. There were a couple of portions that pulled me in, but otherwise this was a very dense read.
February 21, 2015
Hard reading; turgid style; wandering here, there and everywhere. This may be the result of post- structuralist studies.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews