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A war novel or military fiction is a novel about war. It is a novel in which the primary action takes place on a battlefield, or in a civilian setting (or home front), where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, suffering the effects of, or recovering from war. Many war novels are .
Shakespeare's Henry V, which focuses on events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War, provides a model for how the history, military tactics, and ethics of war could be combined in an essentially fictional framework. Romances and in Early Modern Europe, like Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene and Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, to name but two, also contain elements that influenced the later development of war novels. In terms of imagery and , many modern war novels (especially those espousing an anti-war viewpoint) are influenced by Dante's depiction of Hell in the Divine Comedy, John Milton's account of the war in Heaven in Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse as depicted in the biblical Book of Revelation. A notable non-western example of war novel is Luo Guanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
As the realistic form of the novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires rather than truly realistic portraits of war. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War.
Of equal significance is the autobiographical work of Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (1920) (Storm of Steel). Distinctly different from novels like Barbusse's and later Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues ( All Quiet on the Western Front), Jünger instead writes of the war as a valiant hero who embraced combat and brotherhood in spite of the horror. The work not only provides for an under-represented perspective of the War, but it also gives insight into the German sentiment that they were never actually defeated in the First World War.
The post-1918 period produced a vast range of war novels, including such "home front" novels as Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), about a soldier's difficult re-integration into British society; Romain Rolland's Clérambault (1920), about a grieving father's enraged protest against French militarism; and John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers (1921), one of a relatively small number of about the First World War. Also in the post–World War I period, the subject of war is dealt with in an increasing number of modernist novels, many of which were not "war novels" in the conventional sense, but which featured characters whose psychological trauma and alienation from society stemmed directly from wartime experiences. One example of this type of novel is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)', in which a key subplot concerns the tortuous descent of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, toward insanity and suicide. In 1924, Laurence Stallings published his autobiographical war novel, Plumes.
The 1920s saw the so-called "war book boom," during which many men who had fought during the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their war experiences. In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues ( All Quiet on the Western Front) was a massive, worldwide bestseller, not least for its brutally realistic account of the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a German infantryman. Less well known but equally shocking in its account of the horrors of trench warfare is the earlier Stratis Myrivilis' Greek novel Life in the Tomb, which was first published in serialised form in the weekly newspaper Kambana (April 1923 – January 1924), and then in revised and much expanded form in 1930. Also significant were Arnold Zweig's Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (1927) ( The Case of Sergeant Grischa), Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero (1929), Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed (1930), William March's Company K (1933), and Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935).
Novels about World War I appeared less in the 1930s, though during this decade historical novels about earlier wars became popular. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), which recalls the American Civil War, is an example of works of this trend. William Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) is his only novel that focuses on the Civil War years, but he deals with the subject of the long, aftermath of it in works like The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
The 1990s and early 21st century saw another resurgence of novels about the First World War, with Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995), and Birdsong (1993) by English writer Sebastian Faulks, and more recently Three to a Loaf (2008) by Canadian Michael Goodspeed.
Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Troubled Sleep (1949) (originally translated as Iron in the Soul), the third part in the trilogy Les chemins de la liberté, The Roads to Freedom, "depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished feelings of a group of Frenchmen whose pre-war apathy gives way to a consciousness of the dignity of individual resistance - to the German occupation and to fate in general - and solidarity with people similarly oppressed."Random House blurb The previous volume Le sursis (1945 , The Reprieve, explores the ramifications of the appeasement pact that Great Britain and France signed with Nazi Germany in 1938. Another significant French war novel was Pierre Boulle's Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952) ( The Bridge over the River Kwai). He served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and helped the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina. War is a constant and central theme of Claude Simon (1913 – 2005), the French novelist and the 1985 Nobel Laureate in Literature: "It is present in one form or another in almost all of Simon's published works, "Simon often contrasts various individuals' experiences of different historical conflicts in a single novel; World War I and the Second World War in L'Acacia (which also takes into account the impact of war on the widows of soldiers); the French Revolutionary Wars and the Second World War in Les Géorgiques." He served in the cavalry in 1940 and even took part in an attack on horseback against tanks.John Sturrock, "Obituary" "The finest of all those novels is the one in which his own brief experience of warfare is used to tremendous effect: La Route Des Flandres ( The Flanders Road, 1960) ... There, war becomes a metaphor all too suitable for the human condition in general, as the forms and protocols of the social order dissolve into murderous chaos.'"John Sturrock, "Obituary" French philosopher and novelist,
The The Blitz is the subject of three British novels published in 1943; Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, James Hanley's No Direction, and Henry Green's Caught.Bergonzi, Bernard, War and Aftermath: English Literature and its Background 1939-60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 29. Greene's later The End of the Affair (1951) is set mainly during the flying bomb raids on London of 1944.Bergonzi, Bernard, War and Aftermath, p. 89. According to Bernard Bergonzi "during the war the preferred form of new fiction for new fiction writers in was the short story".Bergonzi, Bernard, War and Aftermath, p. 40. Although John Cowper Powys's historical novel Owen Glendower is set in the fifteenth century historical parallels exist between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the late 1930s and early 1940s: "A sense of contemporataneousness is ever present in Owen Glendower. We are in a world of change like our own".Herbert Williams, John Cowper Powys (Brigend: Seren, 1997), p.126. The novel was conceived at a time when the "Spanish Civil WarOn the April 26, 1937, two days after Powys began his novel, the Spanish town of Guernica, was bombed by the Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. It inspired the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. was a major topic of public debate" and completed on 24 December 1939, a few months after World War II had begun.Charles Lock, " Owen Glendower and the Dashing of Expectations". The Powys Journal, vol. XV, 2005, p.71. In the "Argument" that prefaced the (American) first edition of 1941, Powys comments "the beginning of the fifteenth century ... saw the beginning of one of the most momentous and startling epochs of transition that the world has known".p.x. This was written in May 1940, and "there can be no doubt" that readers of the novel would have "registered the connection between the actions of the book and the events of their own world".W. J. Keith, Aspects of John Cowper Powys's 'Owen Glendower' , p.69.
Fair Stood the Wind for France is a 1944 novel by H. E. Bates, which is concerned with a pilot of a Wellington bomber, who badly injures his arm when he brings his plane down in German-occupied France at the height of the Second World War. Eventually he and his crew make the hazardous journey back to Britain by rowing boat, bicycle and train. Bates was commissioned into the Royal Air Force (RAF) solely to write short stories, because the Air Ministry realised that the populace was less concerned with facts and figures about the war, than it was with reading about those who were fighting it.
British novelist Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags (1942) is set during the "Phoney War", following the wartime activities of characters introduced in his earlier satirical novels, and Finnish novelist Väinö Linna's The Unknown Soldier (1954) set during the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union telling the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers. Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) (published as The End of the Battle in the US), loosely parallel Waugh's experiences in the Second World War. Waugh received the 1952 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Men at Arms.
Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948) is another war novel. However, even though events occur mainly during World War II, the violence of war is usually absent from the narration: "two years after the Blitz, Londoners, no longer traumatised by nightly raids, were growing acclimatised to ruin."Ellmann, 152. Rather than a period of material destruction, war functions instead as a circumstance that alters normality in people's lives. Stella confesses to Robert: " 'we are friends of circumstance⎯war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing's said." Heat of the Day, 210 There are, however, some isolated passages that deal with the bombings of London: Heat of the Day, 98
More experimental and unconventional American works in the post-war period included Joseph Heller's satirical Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an early example of postmodernism. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, and James Jones' The Thin Red Line, all explore the personal nature of war within the context of intense combat.
The English Patient is a 1992 Booker Prize novel by Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burned man—the titular patient, presumed to be English; his Canadian Army, a Sikh British Army sapper, and a Canadian thief. The story occurs during the North African Campaign and is about the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters.
The decades following World War II period also saw the rise of other types of war novel. One is the Holocaust novel, of which Canadian A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, Italian Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and If Not Now, When?, and American William Styron's Sophie's Choice are key examples. Another is the novel of internment or persecution (other than in the Holocaust), in which characters find themselves imprisoned or deprived of their civil rights as a direct result of war. An example is Joy Kogawa's Obasan, which is about Canada's deportation and internment of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.
Similarly, the life story of a Ukrainian boy who is at first interned in a labour camp and then drafted to fight for Russia is depicted in UKRAINE - In the Time of War, by Sonia Campbell-Gillies.Ms Sonia Campbell-Gillies (2016). 9781537546179, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 9781537546179
Black Rain (1965) by Masuji Ibuse is a novel based on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The Sea and Poison (1957) by Shusaku Endo is about Japanese medical experimentation on an American POW.
Some contemporary novels emphasize action and intrigue above thematic depth. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October is a technically detailed account of submarine espionage during the Cold War, and many of John le Carré's spy novels are basically war novels for an age in which bureaucracy often replaces open combat. Another adaptation is the apocalyptic Christian novel, which focuses on the final showdown between universal forces of good and evil. Tim LaHaye is the author most readily associated with this genre. Many , too, use the traditional war novel as a departure point for depictions of fictional wars in imaginary realms.
Iran–Iraq War was also an interesting case for novelists. Events and memoirs of Iran–Iraq War has led to unique war novels. Noureddin, Son of Iran and are among the many novels which reminds the horrible situation of war. Many of these novels are based on the interviews performed with participants and their memoirs.
The post 9/11 literary world has produced few war novels that address current events in the War on Terrorism. One example is Chris Cleave's Incendiary (2005), which made headlines after its publication, for appearing to anticipate the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
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