Customer Reviews

The Thin Red Line: A Novel

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is the best combat novel of World War II infantry ever written. The second of an autobiographical trilogy planned by Jones (with "From Here to Eternity" being the first, and "Whistle" planned to finish the storyline) it covers the shortest span of time, and it is also the shortest. But it is probably the most intense and I think, the most gripping. Avoid Terrence Malick's cinematic version which I think missed Jones' vision by a mile.

In this novel, we see "C for Charlie" company's struggle for some fictional territory on Guadalcanal in late 1942. It carries some of the most intense sequences of infantry combat ever committed to paper (one of the most harrowing is the company clerk, Bead and his run-in with a roving Japanese soldier while attempting to relieve himself is particularly effecting to make it all the more remarkable, it's based on Jones' own personal experience).

I can't recommend this masterpiece highly enough. Jones has captured for all time, the sights and smells of infantry combat better than anyone before or since. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

"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.

The Thin Red Line is not a bad book, in many ways it's a great book. It's just that there is a thin line between great and OK. And Jones almost gets there but never quite hits the mark like the movie does. While the book strugles with divining what the thin red line is, the movie makes it crystal clear.
The movie which adds haunting poetic mystery to the world yet able divine a story of good and evil, love and hate, beauty and ugly, fear and bravery, etc. and that thin line between them. Add to that great acting and beautiful fliming.

Someone made a better movie then the book.Is that's the ultimate praise of a movie? Maybe not, but someone did it.

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.

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."

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.

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.

The Thin Red Line is a fast paced exciting novel of combat on Guadalcanal. Forget all that you know about the dull introspective movie of the same name, the book is nothing like the movie.

The novel details the adventures of C Company as they arrive on transports and engage in two battles. At the outset of the action Guadalcanal has already been invaded and the men of C Company are part of a force that will mop up remaining Japanese forces on the island. There is a cast of dozens of characters that is too long to detail here. Most are well-formed individuals. Jones takes us into the thoughts of each man. We read each mans inner dialogue as he is forced into life or death combat situations. All are scared, some rise to the occasion, some find they enjoy killing, some go mad and many are killed or wounded. Just like real life. They do not spend their time contemplating lizards and jungle foliage as is in the movie.

The characters go through a transition from scared untested troops to battle hardened veterans all in the course of a two-day battle for a hill called the Dancing Elephant. Jones describes how they acquire the "thousand yard stare" along with a mental numbness that inures them from horrors of battle.

After the first battle the men are given a week off which they spend getting drunk. Their too-cautious Captain Stein in relieved of command and his exec, First Lieutenant Band takes over. Band is eager to prove himself and volunteers his company to lead the next assault, the battle of the Great Boiled Shrimp.
This battle is a success and the Japanese are completely defeated. Unfortunately Band is judged to be too reckless by his superiors and he too is relieved.

With these two battles behind them, a new company commander is appointed. Captain Bosche is a stranger to the men, having been transferred from another division. Many of the veterans are promoted to fill ranks thinned out by casualties. Many others find that they can talk the army doctors into transferring them away for medical care, even though some aren't very sick or disabled. The novel ends with C Company climbing into another transport to be taken to fight for another island.

Unlike many other war novels, The Thin Red Line does not have a single overarching message. In this book, war is hell but it is also fun. Killing is bad but it also exhilarating. Heroism is a complex issue here. No man is purely heroic but many do behave heroically. Some do so because they don't want to be thought cowards by their buddies, others because they are hungry for glory, medals and promotions. One soldier, "Big Un," volunteers for a dangerous mission because he's upset that the Japanese are killing captured Americans. During that mission he himself kills several Japanese who are trying to surrender, screaming at them that this will teach them not kill captured Americans.

There are a few stylistic issues that I found annoying. Jones gives every man a monosyllabic name. He insists on unnaturally referring to the company as C-for-Charlie every time he mentions it. Other companies, such a B-for-Baker, are named similarly. Natural speech would of course abbreviate familiar names. There are other similar stylistics excesses. An officer is referred to a "pickle nosed, mean and mean-looking" every time he appears. Jones probably thought he was quite the artiste in doing this but I found it annoying and distracting

These minor points aside, The Thin Red Line is enjoyable, exciting and well worth reading.

This novel is about loss on humanity during the battle of Guadalcanal (but it could be any war at any point in history). This loss occurs right from the beginning - when the U.S.soldiers are herd together in the stinking holds of the troop-ships - until the capture of a hill occupied by the Japanese. Maybe there is no really a plot but there is one very colourful character with many faces: humanity.(One thing though, the novel sometimes suffers from long-windedness).

The Thin Red Line is one of the few warfare novels that entertains the reader with both gripping combat descriptions and believable, developed characterizations. It is at once both adrenaline-pumping and psychologically engaging, and somehow never loses momentum, even when the action stops. James Jones' simple, vulgar, and addictive prose sucks the reader into the world of the soldier, and he'll want to come back only to reassure himself that he's at home, safe and sound. Set on the island of Guadalcanal at the beginning of WWII, the novel centers about C-for-Charlie Company, a group of soldiers thrust into combat for the first time. The soldiers do not, however, enter into combat immediately. First they must travel through the oppressive tropical jungle, getting closer and closer to the fighting as they go, all of them dreading what is to come and wondering how they, themselves will react to combat. When they do fight, very few of them react as they thought they would. Some find they are cowards, some conquer their fear and become heroes, and all the while the reader shares in their apprehension, their terror, and their exultation. Like all great books, The Thin Red Line is highly thematic. Through the soldiers' thoughts, Jones discusses a number of topical issues, from the ethical to the political to the sexual. One of the most important recurring issues is the question, "How much difference can one man make?" Others include governmental authority, homosexuality, and how men act vs. how they think. The depth of the soldiers' thoughts gives us insight into their characters and is truly what sets this novel apart. Any reader will enjoy the novel for its characterizations and the mental stimulation it provides, and the enthralling action puts icing on the cake. The Thin Red Line is truly an American warfare classic.