Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut

"The most original anti-war book since Catch-22" it says on the back. I probably read Catch-22 too young because I just don't remember being very moved by it. Or even understanding it. I did better with this one.

It's the story of the Vonnegut's alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, who is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and imprisoned by the Germans in Dresden at the beginnning of 1945. Days after his arrival in Dresden the city is firebombed by the allies. Over 100,000 civilians were killed in that raid, far more than in either of the atom bomb raids on Japan. By being forced to work underground in a meat processing cellar (slaughterhouse number 5) Billy Pilgrim's POW unit is saved from death at the hands of his own airforce. How many paradoxes just in that one sentence?

Vonnegut announces at the beginning of the novel that it's going to be about the firebombing of Dresden then, like any good storyteller, saves the bombing for the last few pages. In between, in dreamy and meandering fashion, he tells a number of other stories. There's Billy's capture and his transport across a disintegrating Germany. There are also snippets dealing with his post-war life, his career, his marriage and his children. The book covers some 50 years in seemingly random chronological order - partially explained by a strange but engaging sci-fi/time travel element. At times I couldn't decide whether I found the dreamy prose style and haphazard structure irritating or hypnotic. Perhaps both. The same goes for its rather intrusive catchphrase "So it goes." which is how Vonnegut rounds off any paragraph (and there are many) dealing with death or disaster.

I guess that's one of the things that makes it an anti-war novel. "So it goes" is the book's reaction to all the deaths in the book, whether incinerated along with your family in Dresden or dying in your sleep at the end of a long and comfortable life. I suppose Vonnegut is saying that death in war is no different from any other death. Perhaps it's just a little more industrialised, a little more concentrated in one place and time. Certainly it's never heroic.