The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers - review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/31/the-yellow-birds-kevin-powers-review

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"We were not destined to survive. The fact is we were not destined at all. The war would take whatever it could get. It was patient. It didn't care about objectives, or boundaries, whether you were loved by many or not at all. While I slept that summer, the war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on." The young soldier speaking these words is John Bartle, a private in the US army of occupation in Iraq. He is soon to witness a horrifying yet oddly casual shooting and will later be implicated in an act that, while it is committed for the best motive, will almost destroy both his mind and any lingering moral sense he may still possess on his discharge after two years of service on the battlefields of Nineveh province. His co-conspirator in that act is his sergeant, a brilliantly defined gung-ho nihilist named Sterling, about whom John feels the most disturbing kind of ambivalence:

"I hated the way he excelled in death and brutality and domination. But more than that, I hated the way he was necessary, how I needed him to jar me into action even when they were trying to kill me, how I felt like a coward until he screamed into my ear 'Shoot these hajji fucks!' I hated the way I loved him when I inched up out of the terror and returned fire, seeing him shooting too, smiling the whole time, screaming, the whole rage and hate of these few acres, alive and spreading, in and through him."

Like his narrator, Kevin Powers was a soldier in Iraq for two years, serving in Mosul and Tal Afar. In a brief preface he says that The Yellow Birds began as "an attempt to reckon with one question: what was it like over there?" However, he quickly decided that he was unequal to that task, because "war is only like itself".

This is a perennial problem in trying to describe those experiences that relatively few share: war, madness, extreme violence or suffering, spiritual visions – all of these are only like themselves. But the fact is that, while they cannot be fully conveyed in words, the work of bearing witness – to create what Powers calls "the cartography of one man's consciousness" – is essential; and while few will have expected the war in Iraq to bring forth a novel that can stand beside All Quiet on the Western Front or The Red Badge of Courage, The Yellow Birds does just that, for our time, as those books did for theirs.

In the creation of his three principals, moreover, Powers has given us a highly sensitive and perceptive portrayal of men at war: the mysterious, vulnerable Murph and the brutal but enormously damaged Sterling are wonderfully delineated, and it is no accident that the central character's surname makes us think of Melville's Bartleby, another man numbed to the point where, in the end, all he can do is refuse to perform the few simple acts that would preserve him.

No doubt it will seem rash to make such references in praise of a first novel, but they are difficult to resist after a close reading of this extraordinary work: the final vision alone, in which a young man's tortured and broken – but also transfigured – body is washed away by the slow current of the Tigris is both highly risky and beautifully accomplished, the mark of an artist of the first order. The Yellow Birds is a must-read book, not only because it bears witness to this particular war, but also because it ekes out some scant but vital vision of humanity from its shame and incomprehensible violence.

"The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission."

• John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is published by Jonathan Cape.

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