War Story

by Derek Robinson

Book Overview

Filled with thrills, this novel by Booker Prize nominee Robinson also serves as a frightening expos? of the absurdities of the First World War. In 1916, Oliver Paxton enters the Royal Flying Corps a na? ve young patriot. Pompous, foolish, and enthusiastic, he is determined to prove himself. But, as the realities of war, as well as the lax morals and casual cruelty of his fellow pilots, take their toll, Paxton becomes as disillusioned as those who...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394563891
• ISBN13: 9780394563893
• Release Date: March 1988
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 295 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

It takes no great skill to die, no skill at all...

WAR STORY is Derek Robinson's masterpiece. It is better than PIECE OF CAKE, which was filmed in 1988 for LWT, and it is better than GOSHAWK SQUADRON, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1971. It is simply an excellent novel every bit the equal of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT or CATCH-22. Unlike Robinson's other wartime aviation novels, this one gives us a single character to focus most of our attention on. Paxton is a young pilot, fresh from flight school, who thinks that the First World War is the greatest thing to ever happen to the world. He is longing for the chance to sink his teeth into the enemy and come home a hero. Instead he makes a mess of his very first mission -- to lead six replacement planes across the channel -- and becomes an air-gunner, paired with a cynical veteran pilot. He witnesses the Battle of the Somme, which he thinks is a great opportunity for the British cavalry to show their stuff. He meets a rich English girl who throws extravagant parties for the soldiers, and he boasts to her about the Germans he's killed. Watching him butt heads with the more experienced pilots is perhaps the major conflict of the book, and a great well of black comedy. Paxton simply doesn't understand why no one else seems to be having a good time. He even argues with his pilot in midair. But no one can remain unchanged forever, which Paxton discovers by the end of the book. The rest of Hornet Squadron is not left out. We are introduced to Kellaway -- who will reappear in PIECE OF CAKE and A GOOD CLEAN FIGHT in the next war; Cleve-Cutler, the new commanding officer who fortifies his pilots with Hornet's Sting, a potent mix of every type of booze imaginable; and Corporal Lacey, a public school-educated clerk, who tells us, "It takes no great skill to die. No skill at all, in fact. Thoroughly unqualified people do it all the time." Until Robinson began writing, fiction of this sort was limited to the adventures of Biggles, hero of boy's-own pulp magazines. GOSHAWK SQUADRON changed that, and thank heaven. WAR STORY, by the end, is more moving and more focused than Robinson's other novels. It is funny and tragic in equal measure. Read it.

Best of the trilogy

For mine this is the best of Derek Robinson's WW1 trilogy, but I am a huge fan of all his novels. War Story is totally authentic, the characters (in particular Paxton, O'Neill, and Lacey, plus Judith Kent Haffner) as usual are brilliant creations, and the historical background is very well researched. The humour is unsurpassed. As always for me, a profound sadness accompanies the ending and creates a sense of nostalgia which makes one want to start the story all over again. Top stuff.

Tragically Funny

In 1916 the main character, Oliver Paxton, a very young and inexperienced officer pilot, ferries a plane to France in order to join Hornet Squadron. Paxton hopes to accumulate feats of glory and has an "outsider's" view of the war, typical of the man who has not seen a comrade die before his eyes. His cavalier attitudes make him an outcast in an environment where teamwork and belonging count for a lot to a man's sanity. Gradually, through several funny and tragic events, Paxton replaces his do or die for England attitude with a more realistic view of the futility of war, specially World War I. War Story is funny in the same way Catch 22 is funny, it contains hilarious dialogue and absurd situations only possible with a bunch of well educated men who are resigned and almost certain of their impending and sudden flaming death and are constantly fighting their desire to flee the war and to survive but do their daily duty as if nothing else mattered. The tragedy is that the funnyness is all withing the real tragedy of a war few who were fighting it understood at all. Robinson is a master at the art of writing war novels. I fully recommend this book. I do wish the rest of the trilogy will be reprinted again.

A first rate story of air combat in world war one

An excellent book which is sadly out of print. The story and characters met here also appear in Goshawk Squadron and Hornets Nest. This book gives a real feel of what it must have been like to fly and fight in the air in World War One. Like many of Derek Robinsons books it contains a combination of humour and horror. The relatively comfortable lives of the pilots on the ground is thrown into stark relief with the danger and discomfort of their lives in the air. I can highly recommend it

excellent character study of the effects of war

War Story is the first in a trilogy of sorts. It begins the saga of Hornet Squadron in World War One (it is continued in Piece of Cake and A Good Clean Fight which take place during World War Two (by the same author)). All three books are character focused rather than the usual war fiction standard of being action based - though the dogfighting scenes are incredibly well done. Take All Quiet on the Western front, put the action in Airplanes, and add excellent, and sometimes hilarious, dialog, and you have War Story.