Anatomy of a Soldier
Harry Parker
[Faber & Faber]
In Anatomy of a Soldier, author Harry Parker explores an English soldier’s journey through war in the 21st century from the perspectives of 45 different inanimate objects. This inventive narrative is initially slightly jarring, as the personified object speaks in the first person and changes with each short chapter. We are introduced to the novel’s world by what turns out to be a tourniquet, for example, and the second chapter is narrated by a bag of fertiliser. Certain objects introduce themselves – “I am an olive-green 30-litre day-sack” – while the reader is left to decipher others. The objects refer to the protagonist by his Zap number, BA5799, but we gather from dialogue that his name is Tom Barnes. By placing these objects, pivotal in their uses, at the centre of the narrative, Parker develops a strange but intimate relationship between the reader and characters.
The novel is non-chronological, retelling the same events from different angles. We glide from the British Army base to the home of a local family whose lives are destroyed by conflict; from an insurgent’s hideout to an operating theatre in England. These environments carry a degree of familiarity, having been repeatedly portrayed in film and literature as well as in the media, but Parker succeeds here in both defamiliarising and intensifying the novel’s environments and incidents. The timeline of events is occasionally indistinct, due to the quick turnover of chapters, but the reader’s empathy is consistently engaged nonetheless. Parker’s neutral, objective tone conversely deepens the horror of the violence the novel portrays. The clinical interactions between objects and victims are described almost flatly and with precision, yet the effect is that the reader is forced to look, unblinkingly, at the worst outcomes of war. Parker’s style is deceptively simple, employing multiple angles to add new dimensions to a straight-forward story. Anatomy of a Soldier is a finely hewn novel in which the elision of human narrative somehow humanises the terrible experience of war.
Words: Anna Grace Scullion
