Book Review: "Balcony in the Forest" by Julien Gracq

Set in the war of 1939, the Second World War that is, this book makes an attempt at being a subversive war novel from the rest. Including dream sequences, almost folklore-ish creatures and stories, the book is almost trying to hard to get away from the type that is already running through it via its premise: a war novel. Do I think that this takes away from the harsh realities of the war? Yes, but only slightly. Let me explain.

War novels are meant to obviously shock the reader out of wanting war to continue. Books like "All Quiet on the Western Front" by E.M Remarque and Sebastian Faulks' "Birdsong" can do that for us with the former leaving pre-teen me literally trembling from shock and crying from terror. Does "Balcony in the Forest" do that? No. Nowhere near. I have to say that even though it implements so many subversive tactics to move the novel away from simply being another war story, it does not do much to show us the literal violence, the descriptive nature of war itself. This brings me on to the descriptions.

The descriptions in the novel, no matter how in-depth and no matter how vivid or philosophical or even observational - are few and far between. The novel lacks to go into any real depth about the surroundings and for a novel which is mostly set in a naturalistic atmosphere, you would think that the writer wanted to litter his book with extreme descriptions of this nature. It stops the reader from appreciating, analysing or thinking about the key situations and though as we get towards the end of the novel, there are considerably more and more in-depth descriptions - the first half has practically none that I can say were worthwhile in my attention to the storyline.

The novel tries its best to be a different kind of war story yes, but in terms of allowing the reader into this violent and often horrific war of 1939, it pushes us away and makes us believe that we are always on the sidelines and that we may as well be watching a propaganda advertisement for recruitment on television. I’m not going to lie to you, my reading experience of this book was difficult because of the fact there were so few redeeming factors. Yes, we have a folkloric symbolism, yes we have the backdrop of the second world war and yes, we have characters who are clearly in some form of pain and have some form of PTSD. But, what we don’t have is apt descriptions of length in order to get our brains thinking, descriptions that would get us more involved in the story. Nothing seems to last long enough and the book itself is far too short to really sink your mind into and muse over.

However, there is a description near the very end of the book in which a character is falling asleep which I thought was an amazing way to close near the final parts of the book. The first thing I thought was why the writer was saving this description for the end and then the second thing I thought about was the nature of this description in terms of the war and how the two correlated. I cannot say that I was surprised but I can say that the writer clearly thought through the denouement and the ending far more than he did the opening and the build up. This obviously made the second half of the book far more entertaining to read but it also made me think about why the writer did not include anything like this in the first half of the novel. It is like the writing style changed almost suddenly. It was more confusing than anything else.