Figures In A Landsacpe (Shortlisted For The Booker Prize)

Description: Two soldiers have escaped from a column of prisoners of war, with one gun and a few rounds of ammunition. Their most important resource being their instinct to survive. Safety is 400 miles away, across savage country but all the time they are pursued by a helicopter which hovers overhead. From the author of NO MAN'S LAND.

The terrible, sustained tragedy of two men slowly dying behind enemy lines in (presumably) Vietnam, with every step in their stumbling progression leading inevitably to death. The escape from an enemy camp by tough MacConnachie and the boy Ansell is an explosive act of almost physical necessity on the part of the older man. Ansell, however, suddenly finds himself committed to the man whose ego demands freedom. The two break from the guards, and the painful, hopeless odyssey begins, with four hundred miles of mountainous, hostile country to cross. Ansell's ingenuity and early dependency alternately irritate and involve MacConnachie; but as the older man's strength, his confidence, fail over days of slow dying, a tender concern develops between the two. Torn by guilt at the dreadful journey he has offered Ansell, MacConnachie gives him the final blessing of death, before he himself is killed. As the mountains loom, as the enemy flickers in and out like shadows, Ansell broods on their own "just war" without a "reasonable prospect of success." The men become meaningless figures in a landscape, dying without faith in themselves or anything else, only in respect and responsibility to each other. A violent indictment - not necessarily of the war - but of the degradation of human strength in futile struggles. Not really superior writing, since one is assailed by the journalist's high-pitched insistence, but this is an involving tribute to men dying without a cause. The publishers and James Michener are going to give this strong support. (Kirkus Reviews)