From Author To Auteur

Why is it, do you think, that World War I seems so much more present in Europe than in the United States?
It's interesting because 114,000 American soldiers died during the First World War in 19 months. That's as many as in Vietnam. But, perhaps because it was such a concentrated involvement, it remains distant, and it hasn't occupied the national psyche the way World War II or Vietnam have. It's the same somewhere like Spain, where the Civil War is their great scar and the World Wars don't have any particular resonance. I think it's as simple as that--that it tore apart Europe. Nine million people were killed in World War I--particularly the youth of Britain, France and Germany, so imagine the ripple effect of that through the next generation or two.

Do you ever feel any of that old "anxiety of influence" being part of such a revered literary tradition?
Well, I'm always reluctant to stick myself in a tradition. My writing has really been shaped more by my experience as a teenager in Africa, when I was living in Nigeria during the Biafran war, which was their Civil War, from 1968 to 1970. I was on the fringes of it, but it completely shook me up and changed the way I thought. It was such horrible, ghastly, messy business. All my writing about war--and it's true of "The Trench" as well--is shaped by this urge to de-mythologize, to de-glorify, to make it real. So in a sense, I would place my writing in that tradition of "war is crazy and absurd and meaningless." So it's more "Catch 22" than "The Naked and the Dead." As a result of what I saw and heard about in Nigeria in the '60s, it made me realize that books, TV and movies were telling me something at a great remove from the reality of the experience.

Yet "The Trench" seems to lack the absurdist angle of many of your novels. It's a very direct take on the subject of war.
It's a film about people rather than about fighting. The soldiers do banter and joke, but there's a mounting somberness about what's going to happen to them that, I think, filters back through the film. As we, the audience, know the clock is ticking, and we know the outcome, I think it does tend to shadow the film. So, no, there's not a lot of laughs. It's hard to be lighthearted about 60,000 dead.

© 2000