Abstract

Fiction in Review

The author finds himself not only temperamentally antagonistic but theoretically opposed to the book "The Voice of the Trumpet" by Robert Henriques. It is a novel about the war, and the reader approaches it with respect for the fact that the author is himself a commando officer, someone who has known the real thing, and it imposes a certain delicacy on readers. But the book is so subjective that one quite lose the experience of war in the welter of the author's self-expression. The story opens at the zero hour in a raid, when an exploding shell kills the story's character Captain Smith and most of his men. In a dying vision Smith reviews the reasons for his own and the other men's presence on the "mountainside of war," he is able to accept his death.