Men Die by H.L. Humes
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Overview: Following a military mutiny on a Caribbean island that takes the life of his commander, young Lieutenant Sulgrave returns to the United States and becomes embroiled in a turbulent love affair with the man’s widow.
Men Die is set in a United States-occupied Caribbean island that has been carved out into a honeycomb of tunnels by a battalion of black navy laborers in anticipation of the outbreak of World War n. Lording over the operation is Commander Bo-nuso Hake, a Captain Queeg-like figure who fascinates young Lieutenant Everett Sulgrave, the officer in charge of the actual tunneling and stockpiling operations. Ben Dolfuss, Hake’s former first in command, is the third white man on the island. He appears to have had an affair with Vannessa Hake, the commander’s sensual wife. The entire narrative explodes at the outset as the ammunition dump goes sky-high, leaving alive only Sulgrave and six black mutineers, who piece together the corpse of the commander—and the story of his life and command. Thus the novel itself is a series of highly charged narrative fragments that take us back and forth in time, from Hake’s assumption of command on through the explosion, the funeral of Hake in Washington, and Sulgrave’s pathetic love affair with Vannessa. Some sections include overtly stream-of-consciousness vignettes from the untimely widowed Vannessa’s point of view.
With all this you might think that the book itself was a disaster, as though James Jones had never recovered from a reading of The Sound and the Fury. But Humes’ novel is tersely and convincingly composed, and while it echoes other works it never seems derivative, the result perhaps of its powerfully made scenes (such as a fire drill on the arsenal island in which a fire hose takes on a life of its own and nearly kills some men) and the essentially clear and direct nature of Humes’ prose. Fathers searching for sons, sons looking for fathers, and a military structure destroying that which it is meant to defend: These are some of the motifs from Humes’ first novel that we notice at work again in this second book. In the philosophical musings of the slightly demented Commander Hake we find some of the paranoid theories of The Underground City emerging as a prelude for war in another theater (and clearly echoing some of the chords struck by Mailer in his portrayal of the commanding general in The Naked and the Dead). Men Die is a finely executed, dramatic curtain raiser to the great story of the war, whose last year and aftermath Humes himself portrays with such breadth in his earlier novel.
“you will remain flawed. Not damaged. But flawed somewhat. You’re missing out on a great feast, a great fiesta of human frailty and extraordinary writing.”
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
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