The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.
Kevin Powers begins The Yellow Birds with this now-iconic passage. It’s an image, not of Iraqi insurgents, but of War itself, an implacable foe that thrives in privation and hardship. Against an enemy that grinds up life in its gears, men lose their way, lose their sense of purpose. Especially men who joined thinking they were following the path of heroes carved by ideals-driven forbearers and signposted by battles like Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy and Cho Sin, but find themselves instead in an absurdist drama, a dangerous purgatory with arbitrary rules, contradictory goals and deadly consequences. Midway is a long way from the FOB at Al Tafar in 2004, where The Yellow Birds opens.
Powers doesn't sustain the intense imagery and language of that opening scene, but there's no way he could. Had he managed it, this would be a volume of poetry, not a novel. Still, the panic of the first firefight, the strange indifference Bartle, the narrator, feels when his unit's garrulous translator is killed, and the lull following the intense action both gives weight to the old saw that war is a long stretch of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and initiates the ebb and flow style that the novel takes for its structure. Action moves back and forth in time, settings switch, all swirling around the ur-event, the center of Bartle’s whirlpool, the locus of tragedy from which all consequences unfold.
It is the nature of tragedy to let us, the readers/spectators, know from the beginning what's going to happen in the end. Thus we're relieved of the tension of what happens (which is the province of melodrama, as in “Will Sweeney Todd recognize his Lucy before he kills her?”), and frees us up to focus on why it happens, the inexorable inevitability of the tragedy. Juliet is not going to wake up before Romeo poisons himself--we know it from the beginning. That knowledge changes the way we see the lovers, and it imbues their passion with an optimism and innocence that is not going to be crashed against the hatreds of their respective families but will remain pure, a thing itself outside of time.
Similarly, we know early on that Murphy, the 19 year old from Southwest Virginia and Bartle's sidekick from the day of their induction, is going to end up dead. And we know that Bartle will hold himself responsible, and the company's Sergeant Sterling--grotesque and essential, hero and villain--is hooked up somehow. The mystery is how the pivotal death occurs, and why Bartle blames himself.
This novel has been criticized as an MFA-novel, which it is. Despite the structural weaknesses and clichés, (Bartle’s odyssey from cathedral to brothel, finding relief in neither but at least in the brothel being able to save a woman from being brutalized), The Yellow Birds transcends the limitations of its form. It’s Powers’ first novel. It’s also one of the first novels from the Iraq/Afghanistan era, but its focus is not on war. The war is the setting, or part of the setting, anyway, but the real antagonist is not Iraqi, and there are no winners and losers.
The Yellow Birds stands apart from its contemporaries in another respect. Peel back Bartle’s PTSD-fueled guilt even a little and what you find is the confusion, anguish, fear and helplessness of the soldiers’ families, in this case, their mothers. Bartle’s mother wants to help him; she wants to understand, will do anything to help her son return from the dark place he volunteered to go, and against her wishes. But she can only stand witness as her son’s world unravels.
The ostensible reason for Bartle's guilt is a rash promise Murph's mother demands that he'll make sure her son gets home safe. Not only is that more than Bartle can deliver--he can't even bring himself home safely. And that’s not it, anyway, not really.
Murph’s mother, too, figures in this tragedy, as Bartle centers on her all his own deferred grief in this passage early in the narrative that both undid me and pulled me through this novel I suddenly did not want to read:
I’d had this idea once that you had to grow old before you died. I still feel like there is some truth to it, because Daniel Murphy had grown old in the ten months I’d known him. And perhaps it was a need for something to make sense that caused me to pick up a pencil and write a letter to a dead boy’s mother, to write it in his name, having known him plenty long enough to know it was not his way to call his mother “Mom.” I’d known a lot, really. I’d known that snow comes early in the year in the mountains where Daniel was from, November, sure, and sometimes as early as October. But I only found out later that she’d read that letter with snow falling all around her. That she’d set it on the seat next to her while she mushed her old right-hand-drive Jeep up and down the switchbacks on her route, carving clean tracks through the white erasure that had fallen all throughout the night before. And that as she pulled down the long gravel path leading to their little house, on the winter-dormant apple orchard Daniel had talked about so often, she kept sneaking glances at the return address She must have taken those glances with an unusual level of skepticism for a rural mail carrier as experienced as she was, because she thought each time that something different would be written there. When the wheels of her old Jeep finally stopped, and the whole mass of ’84 metal slid a few last feet in the snow, she’d taken the letter in both hands and become briefly, terrifyingly happy.
I’m not going spoil the mystery, except to note two things: First, what has been called by other reviewers a plot weakness, that the critical action turns on stupidity, to me feels genuine. But then, I know well enough that shit-stupid things happen in war, and the consequences that cascade from them are inevitable. War is not narrative, but a novel is. So there’s some justification in criticizing the randomness of Sterling’s sudden panic and the way he ropes Bartle in. As a reader, it didn’t bother me, but I recognize that other readers who are not so well acquainted with the subject would feel the event somewhat incongruous and disproportionate to its consequences.
Second, Murphy’s humanity is what eventually does him in—he can’t stop feeling; he can’t stop looking for meaning, but he’ll settle for beauty. Losing that deprives him of purpose and reason for being. He is gone long before he dies. For Bartle, the search for significance, the need to make meaning out of chaos, is the human impulse that will eventually lead him back from the rivers that mean nothing but death, whether that river is the James or the Tigris. He survives Al Tafar, but the real battle—the battle for his soul—is fought elsewhere. It isn’t fought in climactic cinematic language, but in the language of small things, hints and understatements as easy to miss as PTSD itself is easy to miss, unless you live with it.
Rivers loom large as places of lost peace, places of death, and possibly rebirth. The Yellow Birds ends with an image of transcendence as the Tigris makes its way to the sea, as Murphy travels the long distance made clean and pure, as the world is endlessly renewing us, transmuting us, and outwearing both conflict and the human world.
Being that this is Powers’ first novel, and that it takes time to master the long form, I anticipate his next book will more structurally adept, but expect that his deft blend of gorgeous language and difficult truth will remain undiluted. In any event, great things could come from this writer, and should.
The Yellow Birds
By Kevin Powers
230 pp., Little, Brown, 2012