War and Peace
My book group meets every six weeks. We decide by raffle what fiction to read. We each suggest two titles: one classic, one contemporary. The time before last my choice of the new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky provoked a couple of anxious glances. ‘I knew it,’ Y hissed as my number was drawn from her beret.
I felt guilty. I am quite new to the group and don’t want to drive the stalwarts away.
Because of the book’s 1200 pages our chairwoman decided on 300 pages-a-go over four sessions.
At the meetings we say what we will, then vote out of ten on content, then style, then enjoyableness. Last time three of us, with only 900 pages to go, chirruped ten ten ten as we tried to describe the scale and vision of the journey we felt ourselves to be on – how truth accumulates, how illusory personal freedom proves to be…
The other three were fed up. Two two two they intoned, like Amy Winehouse declining rehab. It was heavy in every sense, all that French, and all those unpronounceable names and all those battles and padding.
It was felt that the ayes should go it alone – we’d stay late after the next session to discuss 300 more pages between ourselves. I’m glad I’m with the ayes and not the nays. Absorption into this epic stops my own life racing away. But it’s strange for me, moving from the Napoleonic wars of 1805-12 to - as research for Edith Cavell - the erupting of Europe a hundred years after that. A continuum of carnage, destruction, grief and pain. Old wars elide with new wars, the war appetite stays, the cost’s not counted and new approaches aren’t made.