Flanders Patricia Anthony's Flanders Is

FLANDERS Patricia Anthony's Flanders is brilliant piece of writing. There is something very real about this fictional war story and what makes it worth reading more than once is its highly realistic portrayal of war and resulting anguish. Anthony wrote the book in 1998 but unfortunately it failed to find an audience. This is a disturbing, depressing and sad fact.

However the blame must not be placed on Flanders itself, rather it rests with the poor marketing of the book by a Publishing house that was better know for publishing science fiction. Flanders is as further away from being a science fiction as any story can possibly be. It is dark tale focusing on the futility of war and on resulting ethical conflict that can easily rob an honest man of all that he once believed in.

Flanders' setting is Europe in 1916 when World War I was shattering the dreams of many and casually eroding an entire generation. Travis Lee Stanhope is an idealistic youth who is brilliant enough to have been admitted to Harvard Medical School but naive enough to leave it all for a chance to see Europe. He enlists in the British Army and goes to war in his idealistic yearning to experience everything first hand. However his idealism and naivete receive an excruciatingly rude shock when he discovers the horrors of war.

In his letters to his younger brother in Texas, Stanhope reveals the true face of war in a manner which is at once dispassionate and fiery. It is as if he is unable to come to terms with the reality of war. Travis doesn't really comprehend that war could be so horribly sickening and writes letters that reveal a very disturbed lost soul. It's beautiful from a distance, war. Artillery glittered and sparked along the horizon. The strikes struck cloud-high blossoms of fire.

Green flares sailed the night like drowsy fireflies. (...Flanders, page 36) There is nothing beautiful about the book except the prose itself. The author has poured her heart out and everything comes straight from the battlefields. Even reading it transports you to an entirely different world of rotting bodies, failing youth and empty souls. The trenches here are crumbling. The mud's ankle-deep. Dig a hole anywheres, it fills up with water. The soil is full of stinking bodies and white, knobby bones. The earth spews up death.

it's built into the walls. Down the trench a Frenchie, last season's casualty, is sticking halfway out the bags: one horizon-blue leg; a bloated arm with two fingers off, another rotted to bone. The boys who were here before us said they'd miss him. (Flanders, page 210) In the beginning of his gory adventure, Stanhope feels superior to others since he is different. He considers his nationality an asset and doesn't feel ashamed when British officers try to belittle him.

"The English may have seen war, but I have lived with Pa, so I have seen Hell." But it all turns against him when he is accused of murder, rape and crimes he never committed. He is accused without any proof and even the ones he considered his friends side with the accusers. The whole war scene gets even more bleak and darker as Stanhope finds himself among enemies on his own front.

The story turns from depiction of external horrors to delusions of inner world that Stanhope experiences as war progresses. These delusions have a strong bearing on him as begins seeing an imaginary graveyard. The delusions turn even stranger when he notices that he is capable of seeing ghosts of dead soldiers that roam around in the battlefield not knowing they are dead. His world has turned upside down since he came to war and he is no longer naive young man lost in his own idealistic world.

When idealism clashes with ugly realities, the result is even as shattering as the mental and emotional state of Stanhope who longs to share his experiences with his brother in a desperate attempt to make some sense of the senselessness surrounding him. The description is sometimes extremely explicit to the point of being gross- but it is the strength of such vivid recollection that makes all the difference.