The Thin Red Line

Rating:
Summary: An Important War Novel
Review:
This is the sort of book that you "live" more than you read. It really takes you in. I recommend to see the movie beforehand (the latter is very different from the book in some respect but both are major works of art).

Rating:
Summary: A war novel for intellectuals
Review: "The Thin Red Line" is not your average war novel. I've read books like "Battle Cry" and "The 13th Valley", and while they explored the feelings and experiences of soldiers in combat, neither of those books - or any similar novels I've read - discussed war in terms used in your average college course.

"The Thin Red Line" discusses war in the terms of an intellectual exercise, although there's also plenty of action throughout the novel. This does not make it a bad novel, but it does make it into a different type of war story than you may be used to reading. You need to understand that going into this book, or you may not want to keep reading it.

Rating:
Summary: A war novel for intellectuals
Review: "The Thin Red Line" is not your average war novel. I've read books like "Battle Cry" and "The 13th Valley", and while they explored the feelings and experiences of soldiers in combat, neither of those books - or any similar novels I've read - discussed war in terms used in your average college course.

"The Thin Red Line" discusses war in the terms of an intellectual exercise, although there's also plenty of action throughout the novel. This does not make it a bad novel, but it does make it into a different type of war story than you may be used to reading. You need to understand that going into this book, or you may not want to keep reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Carrying the news
Review: George Plimpton has stated that "The Thin Red Line" contains the best writing about war ever put on paper--"better than Tolstoy, better than anyone."
Irwin Shaw has said that one of the key obligations of novelists is "carrying the news of one generation to those that follow. If you want to know what it was like to be alive and be an American soldier during World War Two--not only in the foxholes of the front lines but in the bars, on the parade grounds, on the hospital ships and military hospitals. If you want to know what it was really like to be alive and walking the streets of 1941 Honolulu or 1943 Memphis, or to fight on Guadalcanal, then you read James Jones. He has carried the news and will be read hundreds of years from now by those who want to understand this war and this era."

Rating:
Summary: Bang your head on the wall... it'll feel better.
Review: I can only say that I believe all reading is worthwhile, so reading this book wasn't a complete waste of time. I found a great deal not to like about this book. First, and most important, Jones doesn't give the reader any characters that are very likeable at all. If he had presented one even remotely worthwhile character, it might have made the experience a bit more tolerable and worth seeing through to the end. Second, he so overwrites the thing that after about 100-150 pages you start hearing a voice in the back of your mind begging for it to end. I began to wonder if he challenged himself to see how many different ways he could describe Welsh's grin or whether he just kept inserting references to it, slightly varied, to fill words on a page. I also began wondering if he challenged himself to try and refer to every act of war as some kind of erotic, sexual thrill. Further, I believe he overdoes it with the references to homosexuality - totally degarding the memory and dignity of every soldier who's served his country. Finally, while I've only read this one book by Jones so I haven't anything to compare to, he seems to needlessy inject far too many '$2 words,' which to me came across as almost condescending. I've always been trained that when it comes to art 'less is more.' All that said, there were a couple compelling and relatively well done battle sequences. However, by the last 30 pages or so of the book, I just quit. Why? I really didn't care about any of the characters or what happened to them and had had enough already. Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend the book, nor would I be inclined to read anything else by James Jones.

Rating:
Summary: Keystone of a monumental trilogy
Review: I have always liked the James Jones trilogy of the war era army--
"From Here to Eternity"
"The Thin Red Line"
"Whistle"

"From Here to Eternity" details in unmatched accuracy what the pre-Pearl Harbor
professional army was like for the enlisted man.
"The Thin Red Line" carries that army and those men into combat in the Solomons
with the same honesty and intensity.
"Whistle" takes men wounded in combat home via hospital ship and stateside
rehabilitation center.

Most people have heard of "From Here to Eternity" and "The Thin Red Line" because
they have been made into movies.
"Whistle," the concluding, and in many ways the most important volume of the
trilogy, is less known.

Jones has always dwelt in the shadow of the more famous Norman Mailer. But I
have always thought of Mailer as poseur who wrote what he wrote in order to be
accepted into literary society and become famous. Jones has always seemed to
me the real deal. He enlisted in the army in 1939, was at Pearl Harbor when
the Japs attacked, fought in the Solomons, receiving the Bronze Star with V for
Valor and the Purple Heart.
With the money he made from "From Here to Eternity," Jones founded a writer's
colony and paid the hospital bills of the great and tragic poet Delmore
Schwartz, who clearly influenced Jones' writing. See especially the poem "For
the One Who Would Take Man's Life in His Hands" from the collection "Summer
Knowledge" published in 1938.
As far as I know, no critic has ever noticed this, but the first stanza of this
poem in 12 lines gives the storyline of "From Here to Eternity." The second
stanza gives that of "The Thin Red Line," and the third and final stanza that of
"Whistle."
Jones carried out something remarkable, getting the vision for a monumental
literary undertaking from a poem he read as an enlisted man in a garrison army,
actually carrying out the vision and producing what, in my opinion, is the
definitive American fictional narrative of the war. In short, Jones turned his
life into a poem and that poem into splendid novels.
I stand in awe.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book and an Excellent Movie
Review: I thought both this book and the movie were excellent but the two are so unique in their own way, you almost can't compare them. Both address the difficulties of facing and accepting death brought on by war. The book does this in a realistic, almost 'in your face' way with its detailed depictions of soldiers' experiences, both on the front line and off, and as it delves into each character's evolving thoughts and emotions. James Jones really brings you onto the battle field and into the soldiers' minds. The movie on the other hand takes a poetic, almost ethereal approach, leaving you to wonder and reflect upon death and war. While it doesn't take you deep into all of the character's minds, the movie does offer powerful imagery and eloquent narratives to illustrate its message...as well as excellent performances by the actors themselves. I highly recommend reading this book and seeing the movie, but don't expect them to take you down the same road. And if you're expecting another "Saving Private Ryan", then you should see "Saving Private Ryan". "The Thin Red Line" is on a whole other level.

Rating:
Summary: Is this really considered to be good writing?
Review: I won't summarize the novel here, because there are so many reviews that are already doing a fine job of that. I feel badly for giving this a bad review, because I feel like I'm attacking a respected institution, but I just couldn't get into the style. I have read a few war novels up to this point in my life--All Quiet On The Western Front, War and Peace, August 1914, Darkness at Noon, The Gulag Archipelago--but nothing from the American WWII library. I saw the film and loved it and felt it was time to start exploring James Jones, since he seems to be held in such high esteem, and especially since so many people who loved the book hated the film.
Just as a side note: if Malick had made the film like the book it would have been horrible.
James Jones doesn't allow the reader to make any judgements on his own about how characters are feeling or saying their lines, and makes some of the important characters almost cartoonish. For example, I was annoyed to the point of distraction by the adverbial abuse of the crazy sergeant and his grinning. By the midpoint of the book I went back and counted over 47 different ways that this sergeant "grinned". He was constantly grinning and we always got the description of how he grinned.
I appreciate the place this book has in the historical field of war literature, but it just seemed clumsy to me.

Rating:
Summary: Skip the film, read this book, and be absorbed
Review: In a word - incredible. Terrence Malick's sketchy, loooong, underdeveloped movie does not do this classic justice. If you care about the WW II soldier, what this generation did for ours, and what it was like to fight on an infernal island thousands of miles from home, witnessing savagery and experiencing traumas that you could never fully recover from, you simply must read this one.

James Jones masterfully goes from one character to another, introducing the reader to the character's internal thoughts, while keeping the novel moving, marching through the jungle, to a conclusion that is exactly how it was for the soldier - this battle over, on to the next, what for, who cares - you didn't die, but you probably will on the next island.

How does one manage these thoughts, as a sane, rational human being? Jones' does an amazing job of bringing out these subleties in each character, how each one deals with it, how each one thinks about it. You can almost feel yourself there on the island, having made it through a day of horrors, lost some acquaintances, exhausted, and what for? In WW 2, it wasn't one year and out of service - you were in it 'til A.) you died, B.) you were maimed, or C.) the war ended. After 24 hours of constant combat and no water during a battle, all you had to look forward to during your "recovery" (a day, two days, a week?) was the same thing all over again, until you either died or somehow, the war ended.

While Mallick's films fails spectacularly in attempting to illustrate these points, Jones succeeds in ways that will only cause you to keep reading, imagining what it must have been like, yet thanking your God that you weren't there, and that these brave men were there for us.

I cannot imagine why the earlier reviewer here at Amazon trashed this book. Please make your judgements based on the 30-some glowing reviews and his/her one negative review. My only criticism with this book is that Jones seems to be fixated on the p*nis (can you write p*nis at Amazon?!), and writes about homosexuality among the troops quite frequently. Well, he was there, so he must know, and while I personally don't enjoy reading about a man longing for another's "sweet, girl-like buttocks," I have to defer to the author and trust his experience on this one.

Do yourself a favor, buy this book, and like "All Quiet on the Western Front," add a timeless war classic to your collection that will help add to your "humanistic" understanding of the war, a war which was about tactics and generals and presidents and prime ministers, but more than anything, like all wars, came down to the individual courage and suffering of the individual soldier.

Sermon over.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction?
Review: It's difficult to write a book about soldiers at war. There are always many characters, the ranks are confusing, the description of the battles must be very accurate otherwise the reader will be lost. If it's fiction, the author must be very careful not to, unwillingly, transform his book in a re-telling of other, more commonly known battle events. James Webb managed to write a very good book about soldiers at war, "Fields of fire". Cornelius Ryan wrote a series of excellent non-fiction books about the second World War in its European Theatre.

"The thin red line" is about the battle of Guadalcanal, an island of the Solomons chain and an important base in the south Pacific Ocean, between the american and the japanese troops.

"The thin red line", by author and ex-combatent James Jones, was brought under the spotlights once again more recently after cult director Terrence Mallik transposed it to the big screen, for the second time, in 1998 (the first time was in 1964). The movie is visually beautiful, long, and insightful, with extraordinary development of its main characters. The book does not have visual resources, but Jones' fast prose, moving from character to character, from battle scenes to the long nights spent in the open, all this makes the reader "watch" what is happening with his or her mind, just like it was a movie.

Jones knows what he is writing about. He was there, he did that. And he is intelligent. War battles are not much different, one from another (except if you are actually there, of course). So, Jones technic is to write unusually long chapters, to make the reader feel involved with the environment, with the people of C-for-Charlie Company. All the characters, with no exception, have, contrary to the chapters, unusually short names - four or five letters at most. Witt, Fife, Bell, Dale, Stein, Tall, Bosch, Bead, Gaff, just one syllabe, they are easy to remember and their sonority makes the reader instantly recognize the person associated to the name. Also, the brevity of the names reminds us of the brevity of the lives of his characters, fighting unexpected death at every moment.

"The thin red line" is fiction, but barely. The last sentence of the book gives Jones away. It's fiction in the sense of characters ann their development, and building atmosphere. It is very good fiction, really a masterpiece. And it's a true account on the horrors of war. Fiction and truth, ballanced. Enjoy both parts.

Grade 9.0/10