Books: In Love with Death

THE WAR LOVER (404 pp.)—John Mersey—Knopf ($5).

Is war the product of a “death drive”? Is civilization at the mercy of a nameless army of self-annihilators, men who kill with an almost sexual relish because they are secretly in love with death? In The War Lover (an October Book-of-the-Month Club choice), Novelist John Hersey (The Wall, A Single Pebble) has apparently sworn by the beard of Freud to bed Mars on the analyst’s couch.

The resulting thesis novel is Author

Hersey’s least satisfying piece of fiction. Rigged to the intellectual fashions of the day and noticeably unballasted with solid thought, the Herseyan exposé of war as psychoneurosis is about on a par with the fond illusion of the ’30s that wars were made by munitions merchants. Whenever his story of a U.S. Flying Fortress crew in World War II does get fleetingly aloft, it is thanks to John Hersey’s reportorial reflexes, which are as crisply functional as propeller blades.

The war lover of Hersey’s story is Buzz Marrow, pilot of a bomber called The Body, so named because of the nude painted on its nose. Buzz looks like a burly motorcycle cop, rakes over his crew in billingsgate, yips earsplitting war whoops as the bombs drop away, and slavers over off-duty hobbies that would make good latrine-wall copy. Why diffident Copilot Charles Boman, the novel’s first-person narrator, hero-worships Buzz is a mystery, but it is presumably because Marrow oozes self-confidence and is a genius at the flight controls. Poor Bo is colorless, decent, sensitive about being short, and his virtue consists of the absence of vice.

No one could be more surprised than Bo. except perhaps the reader, when a quiet English girl named Daphne Poole takes him to her Cambridge flat and locks the door. Bo and Daph make beautiful movie music together, scored for “storms of feeling, extraordinary furnace fires, bottomless spasms, tender places, changes, quiets.” After Buzz crudely tries to seduce her. it is Daphne who alerts Bo to his hero’s lies, bluster and twisted bravery—”the courage that wants to be alone, that really wants death for all.” On The Body’s final mission, Buzz keeps his neurotic rendezvous with death, but Copilot Bo does not make it a double date.