The Naked And The Dead

War, as Norman Mailer presents it, is not so much hell as an enormous, badly managed outdoor office, only with artillery, dysentery and considerably less chance of going home at five. The Naked and the Dead follows an American platoon fighting to capture the fictional Pacific island of Anopopei during the Second World War, where the jungle is impenetrable, the enemy is elusive and the officers are busily proving that no situation is so desperate that it cannot be made worse by ambition, vanity and an unnecessarily exhausting order.

At the top sits General Cummings, an intellectual authoritarian with grand theories about power and humanity, most of which become much more persuasive when backed by several thousand armed subordinates. Beneath him is Lieutenant Hearn, educated, sceptical and discovering that privately despising authority offers surprisingly little protection from it. Out in the mud is Sergeant Croft, a naturally gifted soldier whose principal gifts include ruthlessness, endurance and making everyone else wish they had been assigned to kitchen duties. Around them, the men of the platoon march, sweat, quarrel, remember their civilian lives and try not to become minor examples in somebody else’s theory of command.

Mailer moves between the campaign and the soldiers’ earlier lives, showing what sort of men the Army has collected, rearranged into ranks and sent crawling through tropical vegetation. They arrive with different backgrounds, resentments, prejudices, marriages, failures and expectations, only to discover that a uniform is extremely good at making men look alike and not remotely good at making them agree. Heroism occasionally appears, but it must fight for space with terror, exhaustion, spite, boredom and the eternal military conviction that the mountain absolutely must be crossed because somebody senior has pointed at it on a map.

First published in 1948, when Mailer was only twenty-five, this vast and ferociously ambitious novel made him famous before most writers have finished explaining that their first manuscript is nearly ready. It is grim, intelligent, profane, compassionate and magnificently unimpressed by the romantic version of warfare. Battles occur, certainly, but the deeper conflict concerns who possesses power, who submits to it and how long civilisation survives once everyone is hungry, frightened and carrying rather more equipment than the human spine was designed to accommodate.

This Henry Holt fiftieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by Mailer, giving the older literary combatant an opportunity to look back upon the enormous war novel written by his alarmingly confident younger self. At more than seven hundred pages, it is not a book for readers seeking a brisk skirmish before bedtime. It is instead a substantial campaign through fear, masculinity, class, authority and the strange institutional genius by which human beings turn collective survival into a contest of individual wills.

This copy is in Near Fine condition, meaning it has survived rather better than almost everyone inside it. A handsome anniversary edition of one of the defining American novels of the Second World War, offered by Crappy Old Books for readers who like their military fiction monumental, psychologically merciless and refreshingly short of square-jawed heroes staring nobly into the middle distance.

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