The Thin Red Line

JONES, JAMES

ISBN 10: 0006143962 / ISBN 13: 9780006143963

Published by Fontana Press, 1987

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # mon0000090666

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Thin Red Line
• Publisher: Fontana Press
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0006143962
• ISBN 13: 9780006143963
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Described as "an indubitable masterpiece" by the Chicago Daily News. "Among the very best novels written about World War II." It is 1942. An American rifle company is sent to the island of Guadalcanal as the Japanese mount a desperate offensive aimed at establishing their superiority in the South-west Pacific. James Jones tells the story of C-for-Charlie company with graphic and unsparing realism. From the moment of landing, through the bloody and exhausting battle for a complex of hills and the terrifying jungle patrols -- to the departure of the survivors. "Raw, violent, powerful and terrible... James Jones goes more closely into the animal feelings which battle excites than has perhaps ever been done before." The London Evening Standard.

Review

"When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be dead tomorrow, everything was pointless. Life was pointless. Whether he looked at a tree or not was pointless. It just didn't make any difference. It was pointless to the tree, it was pointless to every man in his outfit, pointless to everybody in the whole world. Who cared? It was not pointless only to him; and when he was dead, when he ceased to exist, it would be pointless to him too. More important: Not only would it be pointless, it would have been pointless, all along."

Such is the ultimate significance of war in The Thin Red Line (1962), James Jones's fictional account of the battle between American and Japanese troops on the island of Guadalcanal. The narrative shifts effortlessly among multiple viewpoints within C-for-Charlie Company, from commanding officer Capt. James Stein, his psychotic first sergeant Eddie Welsh and the young privates they send into battle. The descriptions of combat conditions--and the mental states it induces--are unflinchingly realistic, including the dialogue (in which a certain word Norman Mailer rendered as "fug" 15 years earlier in The Naked and the Dead, appears properly spelled on numerous occasions). This is more than a classic of combat fiction; it is one of the most significant explorations of male identity in American literature, establishing Jones as a novelist of the calibre of Herman Melville and Stephen Crane.