Robert O'Connor

Gregor Jordan's 2001 film of O'Connor's novel was grimly funny, but the rather darker and bleaker novel is grim first and funny second. It's hardly surprising that the studio had to make Jordan brighten the story up as much as it could. It's even less surprising that September 11 pretty much killed any chance that this movie was going to get release in the US. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on September 9th, but after the events of two days later America didn't want a story that made its Army out to be ignorant, drug-addled, corrupt, evil, murderous morons.

And the movie pulled its punches in the way the book doesn't. The movie's tag line was a cheery "War is hell... but peace is f*#!%!! boring!". The book's epigraph is a far bleaker quote from Frederich Nietzsche: "When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself."

O'Connor's novel is black humour with a capital B, as the junkie hustler Elwood struggles to stay one step ahead of the greater forces of violence and corruption around him on a US Army base in Germany in the late 80s.

The absurdity of the armed forces in peacetime evokes echoes of the absurdity of "Catch-22" and the lost generation cynicism is more "Less than Zero" bitterness than "Generation X" whimsy. Elwood sees the world as a battle between staying one of the "motherfuckers" or descending to the level of the "motherfucked" - a battle that he ultimately loses.

The strength of the book is that the absurdity and surreal nature of the drug-crazed, drug-dealing, drug-manufacturing "fighting 57th" doesn't become mere "Animal House" hi-jinks, as they tend to in the movie. Its weakness is where the author's studied efforts for lower and lower levels of bleakness get pretentious. Having Elwood seduce the Top Sargent's one-armed daughter out of a combination of perversity and reckless bravado is one thing - but taking her for a picnic on the ruins of a Nazi concentration camp is simply wanky.

Still, unlike the movie, OConnor spares us any happy endings. It's pretty obvious from the beginning that Elwood is going to join the motherfucked and he inexorably does so in grand tragic style. As much as I don't begrudge Joaquin Phoenix's rather more pleasant Elwood escaping the hell of an army at peace in one piece, O'Connor's Elwood could only exit the Army one way.

But don't read the novel if you're having a really happy day.… (altro)