FAR FROM THE CUSTOMARY SKIES

I'm excited about Warren Eyster- yes, more than I was about Norman Mailer or James Jones. He has enormous talent- and- what is all too rare today, a recognition of the possibility of writing vigorously, passionately, without punctuating his text with expletives and four letter words. He has- as have Herman Wouk and Nicholas Monsarrat, the faculty for making one feel the individualities of the men who make up a crew. This book is absorbing reading not for plot interest, but for the controlled awareness of the tensions and impulses and emotions of men who become real people and whose futures somehow become involved in one's own reckoning. One follows the life on a destroyer, as the crude makings of its complement of crew arebrought into unity; one lives the daily round, the areas of boredom, the little tensions that make up the big issues; the violence and antagonism and kinship and linking that provide variants in human relations. One gets some flashbacks into the men's lives, but little except as their pasts project themselves into occasional dreams of futures. One goes through storm and battle and attack by air and undersea. One senses the changing attitude towards danger, the minimizing of fear, the heightened awareness. There's little sense of mounting climax- rather a succession of climaxes until the destroyer Dreher is torpedoed- and Malone, to whom it is all or nothing, sacrifices his fellows to the slim chance of his own brief glory and Polock alone, who had dared escape, is left to the chance of the vast sea reaches of the Pacific.... Even if you feel glutted with war stories, don't miss this.