TURVEY; A Military Picaresque

by Earle Birney

Book Overview

Private Thomas Leadbeater Turvey is nobody's idea of a capable recruit. Shifted from regimental pillar to post, Turvey tries and fails at every odd job in the army with a remarkable genius for mishap.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000J4XGDK
• Release Date: October 1949
• Publisher: McClelland and Stewart
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 125.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

My favourite book about WW II

Earle Birney, a Canadian poet, wrote a "military picaresque" after World War II. My mother introduced it to me, saying that "Every veteran in every Canadian Legion in the Dominion has read this, I think." She also told me that you could recognize every single character in the book. She was right. It is also a very funny book. Birney, when later asked about his most successful prose work, said that he felt he had to write about the war, and the only possible way he could do that was to do it as a comedy.

A pre-Catch-22 WW II story: comic, tragic and ironic.

Great book but not perfect. Story follows fellow (named Turvey, Private Thomas Leadbeater) from enlistment at the beginning of WW II to his dischargment at war's end. Through seemingly unending bad luck (and lots of strange but funny mishaps), he unwittingly misses a personal introduction to the true horrors of war: death, maiming, injury and depravation. Seeing these horrors pile up around him (the death of his best buddy, the maiming of another, etc.), the comic becomes tinged with the tragic. Like Turvey's perpetual grin, Turvey avoids the morbid by exposing the absurd of army life with a good-natured smile,and yet the same exposure brings to light his growing disgust of war. By war's end, Turvey wants out as badly as he wanted in.Really a good book. Won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour (1949).