Death Coming Up the Hill

 Chris Crowe's Death Coming Up the Hill has the potential to be gimmicky: after all, it's written entirely in haiku (976 stanzas--one syllable for each of them 16,592 American soldiers who died in Vietnam), it deals with a boy coming of age in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, and his parent's imploding marriage--both of which have the potential for heavy clichés.

Surprisingly enough, despite the format, the book is compulsively readable (I read the entire thing in less than an hour). The haiku is almost effortless--after the first couple of pages, I stopped noticing that the story was in haiku and was drawn, instead, to Ashe's life, to his obsession with the mounting casualties in Vietnam, his growing relationship with his girlfriend, and the truce he tries to negotiate between his parents, an unlikely couple who married only because he was on the way.

In fact, it might be the haiku itself that lends a kind of sparseness and elegance to the prose. I found the story thought-provoking and poignant, and I think it would probably work great in a high school English classroom (or history, for that matter). There were a few places where the sparseness lent itself more to telling than showing--we get a lot more of what's in Ashe's head than fleshed out scenes from his life, though that isn't always a bad thing. And the alignments between his parents' war and the war in Vietnam were sometimes a little too heavily drawn. All told, these are pretty minor critiques for a book that deserves credit for taking an unusual form and crafting it into a powerful story.

A Brief History of Montmaray

 I first heard of Michelle Cooper's A Brief  History of Montmaray a few weeks ago, when it was compared to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which I adore. So of course I had to find this.

And in some ways, there are a lot of parallels: both narrators are teenage girls, telling their story as journal entries; both live in a relatively reclusive world; and both live the paradoxical world of the impoverished nobility. Sophie is a princess, the niece of the King of Montmaray, a small fictional island somewhere between Spain and England. But she cleans the castle, cooks, and does laundry, as the populace of Montmaray is something less than ten people.

The narrator here is delightful: as a writer, it was interesting to see how the voice itself pulled me through the first half of the novel, which was quite slow. And for all that common writerly advice is that the main character has to want something and actively strive for it, Sophie's not that clearly drawn by her desires. Her role is primarily that of a passive narrator for much of the novel, though it's to her credit and the writer's credit that I still found her interesting and sympathetic.

Not much happens in the first part of the novel: Sophie pines over Simon, the housekeeper's son, who is living in London like her brother Toby, who's struggling with school. The king is mad, and Sophie tries to avoid him while curtailing the worst of her youngest sister's madcap behavior.

But then a pair of SS officers show up on the island ostensibly looking for clues to the Holy Grail, and the  novel takes a sudden, and fairly dark, turn into adventure--the pace picks up dramatically at that point.

For all that I loved the narrator, I missed some of the delightful first romance in I Capture the Castle. So overall, a novel that I enjoyed but didn't love.