Chapter after chapter, battle after battle, Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered … Even the book’s infrequent flaws sometimes serve a valuable purpose in its narrative. There is a blizzard of names, ranks and military terms, for instance, and despite the glossary and unit schematic included in the book, I still felt lost much of the time. That confusion, however, was exactly my experience while covering the United States military as a journalist, and in Matterhorn it struck me as annoying but true … Matterhorn is a raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history.
It reads like adventure and yet it makes even the toughest war stories seem a little pale by comparison … Ironically, the best parts of Matterhorn aren't the battle scenes, which are at times rendered with a literal precision that borders on mechanical. Rather it is Marlantes's treatment of pre-combat tension and rear-echelon politics. It's these in-between spaces that create the real terror of Matterhorn: military and racial politics; fragging that threatens the unit with implosion; and night watch in the jungle, where tigers are as dangerous as the NVA … Given the long list of stellar works, fiction and nonfiction, to come from the Vietnam experience, one might question what more can be said about it. In some ways Matterhorn isn't new at all, but it reminds us of the horror of all war by laying waste to romantic notions.
While no one who didn't serve in Vietnam can really grasp what life in that time, that place, was like, Marlantes comes closer than any American writer ever has to capturing the unrelenting terror and enormity of one of the saddest chapters in recent world history … There's never been a Vietnam War novel as stark, powerful and brutal as Matterhorn — Marlantes manages to exceed the efforts of his closest literary antecedents...He manages to write with a dark and chilling beauty, even as he chronicles some of the most unspeakable events his readers are likely to encounter. It's the rare kind of masterpiece that enriches not just American literature but American history as well.
Marlantes paces the novel expertly, stringing together a rising series of climaxes that ends in Bravo Company's thrilling, heartbreaking assault on Matterhorn. Mellas indeed proves himself as a ‘bush Marine,’ but he learns things about himself most people never have to face. He's capable of killing. In some circumstances, he even enjoys it … Like Christian existentialists who cling to their faith precisely because it seems absurd, Mellas and his fellow Marines try to create their own meaning out of sorrow and memory and the traditions of the Corps. They turn inward and refuse to see that the antiwar movement has its own brand of courage and idealism. Even today, Marlantes seems to view the protesters as little more than rich kids hiding behind their deferments. It's a notable blind spot in a morally and psychologically sophisticated novel that does so many other things so well.
Karl Marlantes, a much-decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, originally wrote a book of over 1,600 pages; now, at almost six hundred pages, it is still very long and sometimes awkwardly written … Matterhorn is very violent, with its casualties like the Marine whose feet are blown off and another in agony because a leech has entered his penis. Such scenes take up many pages … In Matterhorn we don’t come to the inner life of the Marines simply from their actions or speech. We are left with flat attempts to describe their thoughts. One can almost see a comic-book character with the word ‘Thinks’ in a balloon over his head.
Marlantes' writing is evocative. We feel the Marines' exhaustion as they dig gun pits, carry dead and wounded comrades, and nearly die from hunger. During one ‘hump’ through the jungle, Mellas and his men don't eat for eight days. They lick dew off their ponchos to stay hydrated … We smell the stink of fear, blood and unwashed bodies. We even smell death as the body of one of the fallen rots over the week they carry it with them. No one is left behind … Marlantes doesn't tell a new story, and his characters often fit the proverbial war-story stereotypes. But he pitches us into a harrowing narrative we won't soon forget.
Despite a slow, if not stately, opening couple of dozen pages, the author eventually delivers, I promise you, more combat than you may be ready for, most of it seen through the eyes of a fresh new second lieutenant named Mellas … Marlantes keeps both eyes open as he tells the story of these Marines that will take your heart, and sometimes even your breath, away. Few war novels give you life, and death, in the field this vividly, with all of its furor and spraying blood and feces, its hunger and near-madness mixed with the utterly rational descriptive sense that a good novelist is endowed with.
The original typescript was more than twice the length of the finished book, which is probably still too long. A slow build-up is generally welcome in fiction, but Marlantes is not an experienced enough writer to keep the reader interested through 300 pages of dull routine, comradely joshing … But Marlantes trumps Hemingway in one essential respect: he experienced the heat of battle (Hemingway drove an ambulance in the first world war) and the aftershocks are vividly present in his narrative … The tedious ascent of Matterhorn might seem drawn out to some readers, but they should savour each moment, before the shooting starts.
Karl Marlantes anchors Matterhorn in 1969, the year after the world seemed to be shaking on its foundation. The novel is a superb piece of military fiction that deserves a place on the shelf of any reader with even a passing interest in the lore of Vietnam … Matterhorn is most memorable in fusing the horror of combat with the horror of surviving far from the front lines. The bitter racial divides, the soul-rending search for meaning in a war that offers none, the feeling of being powerless at the hands of superiors who view death as a cost others must bear so they can be promoted, are every bit as vivid as what the marines experience in their exquisitely chronicled clashes with the enemy. Anxiety does not let up at base camp … It’s as if when Marlantes fixes his literary lens on Vietnam, he leaves it slightly askew.
Marlantes' book does have all the necessary attributes of a War Novel: the comfortable, overweight, middle-aged men safely in the rear sending young men out to die, the loyalty and rivalry between brothers in arms, the moral and ethical dilemmas. These elements Marlantes works in well and efficiently. Where he soars, however, is in his descriptions of combat — the horrifying particulars of fighting, as well as the exhaustion and boredom in between … Realism is a grim requirement here, and narrative flow halts at times in order to detail the ‘mechanics of departure lines, timing, air coordination ... and hand signals’ … It tolls in the reader's mind and leaves a long, haunting echo.
...a novel of gaining ground and losing the best you know. It is a work about ineffable loss in the wake of questionable policy, and one in which the politics at headquarters is paid for in infantrymen’s lives … Death is always close, coming in many forms. Combat fatalities are understandable; less so are those that occur because of the jungle and weather — and the inability to get men out in time. Mellas is the nexus where all narratives intersect. Insecure and ambitious, he brings the reader into a world that alternates between hard tedium and stark violence … an unflinching story of the brutality of combat and of young men sent out as pawns in a fight that is inevitably fruitless.
Matterhorn, which takes its title from the site of a fierce battle that comes at the climax of the book, is written from the same ground's-eye perspective on Vietnam already provided by movies like Oliver Stone's Platoon and Michael Herr's book of front-line reporting, Dispatches. But it doesn't simply duplicate them. With unrivaled precision, Marlantes, a decorated combat veteran, has spun the fog and filth of war into an engrossing work of fiction … This is not an easy book to read. Jungle rot turns hands and feet into a welter of open sores. Food is scarce or consists of canned goods so tasteless that the troops sprinkle them with Tang or lemonade powder … Matterhorn is clearly the project of a lifetime for Marlantes, and it deserves a place on the shelf of enduring volumes about the Vietnam War.
Cracking its cover is like the click, click, click of the first upward climb of a roller coaster. After that, there's no looking back. It's a brilliant, stomach-lurching ride through the Vietnamese jungle bordering the DMZ … Mellas is initially terrified of appearing to be exactly what he is — scared, ambitious, uncertain. His flaws render him compulsively studiable as he works to protect his platoon, manage Vesuvian racial tension in the ranks and parry all the jungle can dish out: leeches, biting ants, ‘jungle rot’ (when skin oozes with infection), mud, malnutrition, even tigers … At its core, Matterhorn is an unforgettable war story.
If there are any qualities that distinguish Marlantes' novel above others — beyond, say, its sturdy characterizations, unblinking attention to detail and sprinting narrative — it's the combination of immediacy and naiveté that permeates its pages, across which some very young men scramble lest they not grow old … Marlantes' descriptions of battle are exhilarating, but his portrait of warriors at rest is even better — the boredom, the short tempers, the jungle rot, the gangrenous feet, even the leech which, early in the book, crawls up a soldier's urethra — are all made vivid and horrifying … Honor and camaraderie trump good sense and self-preservation in Matterhorn, where anyone is likely to die at any moment, or do something amazing.
Marlantes’s long but simply structured narrative recounts the unhappy lot of a Marine lieutenant, usually called only Mellas, and the platoon under his command ... The combat scenes, and there are many, are finely rendered. Overall, the narrative is a little predictable, however, and it offers only a few surprises of character development and plot that can’t be seen coming from afar.
