My Fated Disappointment with War and Peace, Briefly

When people found out I was reading War and Peace this summer the most common question posed was, “Is it worth it?” To which I generally shrugged, sighed and said, “Yes and no.” For those who love literature and are interested in the evolution and idea of the novel, then it probably should be read. But for most of us, with all the options of books, not to mention various entertainments and outdoor diversions available, the answer leans towards No, that it is not worth it and that life is too short to read War and Peace. You can lead a wonderful life without ever knowing the Rostovs or the Bolkonskys or even its pontificating author.

This is not to say that I feel War and Peace is a bad book per se. Tolstoy does some marvelous work dramatizing one of the most cataclysmic events in Russian history. (Who will dramatize the Russian Revolution? It seems incredible that no Russian novelist has tackled that event and transformed it into a literary epic.) Tolstoy demonstrates a thorough capacity for detail, describing the nuances of aristocratic manners and the gruff speech of common foot soldiers with persuasive savoir-faire. His characters are lively and unique and undergo profound changes, grappling with responsibilities of war and career, marriage, finances, births, and death-- in other words, life in all its glory and banality. As some critics have suggested, should the earth write a novel, it might sound like Tolstoy.

But the Earth is not perfect and neither is Tolstoy’s book for that matter. We can generally gauge the quality of a novel using three primary benchmarks: the story, the characters and the style. War and Peace suffers from many digressions into the lives of periphery characters but remains compelling due to its dramatic historical nature. The main characters, as I mentioned, are mostly sympathetic, their humanity drawn out beautifully. It’s difficult to discuss style since War and Peace is a translation (I had the Anthony Briggs edition) so while we cannot judge Tolstoy by his prose, we can nevertheless opine on his structuring of the novel and the general pool of language he has chosen to tell that story. It is here that Tolstoy astonishes me with his narrative miscalculations. The problem is the author inserting himself into the story to make declarative points that relate to his celebration of a divine force. The unfortunate consequence on the reader is having to bear the lecturing of a writer guilty of a god complex. Little is left for us to interpret on his or her own. Everything must be explained according to the way Tolstoy intended it. He violates the cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell.

In doing so, Tolstoy comes off as an insufferable dinner companion. He never hesitates to interrupt the narrative with long-winded discussions regarding the scientific basis for understanding history (an irritating device that has no place in a novel! None!) but literature, though an aesthetic branch of the arts, is understood by rules established between authors and their audience. Of course these rules are malleable (art being more lenient than science) but to disregard them is done at the writer’s peril.

As everyone knows, whether consciously or intrinsically, good storytelling makes for an irresistible yarn: the writer instills in the reader the need to know what happens. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was an incredible event, changing the course of history. Historical narrative is drawn out in both micro and macro formats-- the lives of individual characters contrasted with the nation’s larger struggle. I found Tolstoy’s telling at the micro level engrossing. For example, on the eve of the French entering Moscow, during the collapse of public order Count Rostopchin’s justification for throwing a criminal (traitor) into the mad violence of a crowd is apropos of Tolstoy’s insight into human character, in this case, a politician’s:

“Since time began and men started killing each other, no man has ever committed such a crime against one of his fellows without comforting himself with the same idea. This idea is the ‘public good…’” (Vol. III, Part III, Ch. 25)

Could a historical novel involving George W. Bush’s faith in the Iraq War be written any different? In a thoughtful meditation on the wastefulness of armed conflict, Tolstoy, speaking through Andrei Bolkonsky in a midnight oil heart-to-heart with Pierre the night before the Battle of Borodino would destroy the young prince, suggests:

“If we didn’t have all this business of magnanimity in warfare, we would only ever go to war when there was something worth facing certain death for, as there is now.” (Vol. III, Part II, Ch. 25).

Here is Tolstoy at his very best, pensive and theoretical, but, importantly, expressing himself through his characters. His narrative problems come when he enters the scene, for example, carrying on about troop movements, particularly the fate of the French army making the catastrophic blunder of retreating on the Smolensk road, which had seen the land around it plundered and destroyed and so would not provide the needs for Napoleon’s massive army. Tolstoy wastes our time with endless dissections of this blunder, reveling in it, repeating it, and in the end, boring us with such eye-glazing assertions and unnecessary sarcasm:

“This was done by Napoleon, the man of genius. And yet to say that Napoleon destroyed his own army because he wanted to, or because he was a very stupid man, would be just as wrong as claiming that Napoleon got his troops to Moscow because he wanted to, and because he was a clever man and a great genius. In both cases his individual contribution, no stronger than the individual contribution of every common soldier, happened to coincide with the laws by which the event was being determined.” (Vol. IV, Part II, Ch. 8)

This paragraph propels two important theories of Tolstoy’s. First, that historians put too much weight on single individuals (personalities) guiding history-- in doing so, they fail to cite the billions of contingencies that determine world events (which are God’s doing). Secondly, it’s another opportunity for Tolstoy to criticize Napoleon. Sometimes it feels he wrote the book for the purpose of excoriating Napoleon to a general reading public. Throughout the novel but especially in the epilogue, Tolstoy goes out of his way to downplay his achievements, arguing that Napoleon was simply an egotistical, arrogant opportunist at the right place and the right time.

This is the book’s greatest failure: not his antipathy for Napoleon-- Tolstoy is entitled to his likes and dislikes-- but that his arguments overwhelm the storytelling in pompous cant. According to biographers, Tolstoy turned to literature as a young writer after being disenchanted with history. In his second epilogue, he spends more than 40 pages (in technical, colorless, dull language) disparaging the work of historians on the premise that they are unable to differentiate the actions on mankind, whether it be free will or motivations built from necessity. What he seems to suggest, dramatically in Napoleon’s retreat and the marriages of Pierre and Natasha and Nikolay and Marie is that they were predestined by a supernatural force. It was all meant to be:

“And just as the indefinable essence of the force that moves the heavenly bodies, the indefinable essence that drives heat, electricity, chemical affinity or the life force, forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and so on, the essence of the force of free will forms the subject matter of history.” (Epilogue, Part II, Ch. 10).

A decade before Tolstoy composed his thoughts on this subject, Charles Darwin had published his Origin of Species, whose arguments of evolution refute Biblical infallibility. Probably, its evidence threatened Tolstoy’s vision of the world. Obliquely referencing Darwin’s thesis, he argues that,

“in the frog, the rabbit and the monkey we can observe nothing but muscular and nervous activity, whereas in man we have muscular and nervous activity plus consciousness.” (Epilogue, Part II, Ch. 8)

But this confuses me. What is the importance of consciousness if everything is divinely predetermined? Is it so we can recognize and celebrate God? And why are we even getting into this? On abstract terms rather than through the prism of the characters’ actions or dreams? Imagine John Steinbeck ending The Grapes of Wrath not with that lovely and tragic scene of the Joads’ pregnant daughter sharing her breast milk with an emaciated stranger but the novelist spending thirty pages examining the causal effects of the Great Depression and the merits of the New Deal. I’d love to read Steinbeck’s views on politics, but preferably in a chapbook or a magazine interview format.

In the epilogue Tolstoy ignores the Rostovs and Bolkonskys, only bothering to mention Napoleon (for one last drubbing) in his final descent into didacticism. Beyond whether or not Tolstoy is persuasive in his argument is besides the point. The best storytelling weaves philosophy into its narrative without resorting to pedantic posturing. I found Tolstoy’s voice irritating, his arguments confusing, his language obfuscating. Not to mention hypocritical. After lambasting historians for telling us how to interpret events, he goes and instructs us himself. The nerve of great minds!

Does God Leave Footprints in the Sand?

There's a great desert in Namibia, in Africa's southwest, where two German geologists went AWOL during the Second World War. They didn't believe in Thousand Year Reichs, Jewish pogroms or master races; they were scientists and primarily curious about what lay under of the surface of the world's upheavals. I mean this literally. Namibia is a region rich in reserves of quartz, jasper, amethyst, among hundreds of other minerals. While rock could transcend eras, the war was a pocket in time, a manmade catastrophe that they did not believe in and were determined to survive so that they might continue their studies. They escaped to the desert where they hid out among the dunes and ridges, canvassed for water and hunted antelope and other animals, much as man must have lived in this region for centuries. Amazingly, they survived for two and a half years before they exhausted themselves of game, water and the gambit of living in the harshest of climates, finally surrendering themselves to the authorities.

Bordering South Africa, Angola and Botswana, Namibia does not figure prominently on most people's minds when they think of Africa, as its recent history is not so pathetic or violent as many others on the continent. In the 19th century, during the gluttonous appropriation of lands, rivers, and mountains it was ignored by the the European colonial powers in the initial rush for conquest. The British had put a flag down in the deep harbor of Walvis Bay but otherwise the coast was not advantageous and the land beyond it, inhospitable. The Germans eventually claimed it for the Kaiser but as with every area of land in Africa, there had been someone settled there beforehand. The Germans fought a vicious battle with the indigenous San Bushmen, forcing thousands to migrate east to the Kalahari Desert where they starved to death or perished from dehydration.

Namibia was pretty much ignored afterwards as a frontier post until diamonds were discovered in 1908. Of course, this raised its profile considerably and became a source of contention among the great powers. It was forfeited by the Germans along with their entire colonial holdings following their defeat in the First World War. A treaty put Namibia under a mandate to be administered by South Africa, back then still a member of the Queen's empire but more or less autonomous. When South Africa achieved nationhood, the rigid and racist social structure known infamously as apartheid was firmly entrenched in its society as well as within its colony in Namibia. Great diplomatic pressure from the UN could not sway South Africa to release its grip until an internal guerrilla movement called SWAPO made things untenable for South Africa to effective govern. Independence was finally granted in 1990.

A lucrative industry, there are very few unemployed geologists in Namibia. For underneath the barren plateaus and mountains of sands are rich reserves of diamonds, copper, gold, lead, tin, lithium, and zinc. Namibia is the world's fifth largest exporter of uranium. Because of the wealth generated from the mining industry, the country feels wealthy by African standards. When I crossed the border from Zambia the landscape was just as forlorn on the Namibian side but the bus stopped at the OK Market, a generic supermarket outfit with America-sized food packages and correspondingly high prices. I was surprised to find three dollar magic shell syrup for ice cream amid the merchandise.

This wealth, is of course, quite deceptive. Like South Africa, there are two worlds in Namibia, black and white, and the distribution is very uneven. The major industries are still controlled by old Afrikaans and English families and wages do not correspond to rising prices. 35% of Namibians are unemployed and 50% live below the poverty line (nearly one-third of Namibians have annual incomes of less than $1400). The desert climate is as inhospitable now as it was a century before. Less than one percent of the land is arable and during prolonged droughts starvation is rampant. And the economic success itself is precarious, dependent on the availability of underground minerals. When they will eventually be irreprably exploited the country's infrastructure has few economic alternatives.

Regardless of technology, irrespective of the minerals, the desert remains formidable, dangerous, unforgiving. It is also a source of tourism. There are canyons, plateaus, vleis (dry river beds), and dunes that give the desert its geographical character. The dunes of Sossuvlei are particularly special--they rise nearly 300 meters from the earth, unnatural mountains undulating into the horizon, a great sand sea. When the wind picks up, sand scurries across the desert's face, giving the land its voice--lingering and soulful-- between the long, stoic silence it invariably defaults on.

How the sand dunes are formed is a bit of magic that takes millions of years to develop. Sediment of iron oxide is carried down the Orange River into the Atlantic where it meets a strong surface current called the Benguola. The Benguola spins the minerals in a cyclical direction against the coastline grinding it up into a fine red sand that is then blown across the land by a southwesternly wind that eventually meets a southeasterly wind, that has picked up along the way sediment from the Orange River upstream. The two winds clash and the fallout is deposited so that the dunes are balanced and colored on both sides, a finely carved ridge forming the dunes' backbone. Erosion from the nearby mountains is the source of quartz and dolorite blown in from more desert winds creating a delicate, sparkling sheen. When the sun rises over the dunes, its ascent to the sky douses the landscape with shifting light like a great finespun Arabian carpet washed over in fresh dye.

Namibia is a geologist's playground, an inspiration, a neverending story of development, formation, erosion. But for most of the country's inhabitants the dunes have very different origins. Like many countries in Africa, almost ninety percent of Namibians are Christians and they believe in the Old Testament, biblical creationism, Intelligent Design. Thousands of miles to the north, the men of the Sahara explain, 'God created the desert for man to find his soul.' Is this because the desert, like any embittered environment can bring out mans' great virtues and extreme depravity? When you think of life and the desert, survival comes to mind because if water is the source of life, surely the absence of it is the proximity of death?

Life manages to persist. Amid the rugged terrain outlining the desert's frontier, trees are sparse but they do grow and some of them are home to giant nests of birds calles sociable weavers. Dozens of these birds live in the same nest, building upon the shelters to accommodate growing populations. Creating a complex apartment aviary, the nests can grow so large they uproot trees. 

On the road between the urban sprawl of Windhoek and the desert are birds-of-prey gliding in slow, deliberate circles, wild horses grazing on yellow grass, fat cattle slouching on the long march, and the occasional baboon seemingly shiftless and bored on a rocky outcropping. Indeed, in Nambia, one gets the impression that biblical creationists would lose the great evolutionary debate. Even to the casual, amateur eye, the formations and the adaptive qualities of the wildlife indicate the earth is a very old place.

Yet one can't help but feel that God does exist, because the desert and the surrounding landscape feels much more intricate than the aftermath of a climate pattern. This is divine and inspired beauty and while I don't think it necessarily demonstrates a Biblical Jehovah at work one is inclined to believe in some mysterious force present.

At a distance the sand dunes are conspicuously empty of life. But when one puts his or her foot in the sand, a little black-rounded bug, with a curved thrusting blade in front emerges from the depths. If one touches your shoe they squeeze into a little ball or dig themselves under the grain. The 'bulldozer' beetles have managed to stay alive in the desert for millions of years, through unbelivable summer temperatures and great desert storms. These robust creatures persist in a climate not made for life at all.

There is something both frightening and wonderful in that.

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005