Book Review: Slaughterhouse 5

This month’s book for Chorlton Chapters is one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works. I finished it in two sessions (mainly), the second being on the train down to London last Thursday. That second session being about two-thirds of the book, it lasted the whole two-and-a-half hour journey. I literally read the last paragraph just after the train had stopped at Euston.

We chose this book for October based on the fact that it was the third time it had been selected for the vote, and it seemed (to me at least) that the damn’ thing would keep being brought back until we accepted it. And personally, having heard the title bandied about for years, I wanted to read it. I was intrigued.

I hated it. I don’t remember reading any of Vonnegut’s other work, but I must have come across him before even if only in short story form. This, I hated. From the irritating mantra “so it goes” every time anyone, or anything, is killed or dies, to the idiosyncratic, almost stream-of-consciousness prose of the narrator, to the minutiae of the boring life of Billy Pilgrim, I really could not see what all the fuss is about. And there is fuss, believe me. Read the glowing reviews on Amazon, or find study notes for the book that wibble on about Vonnegut's genius. One American college teacher states: "It is part of Vonnegut's genius that he is able to both poke fun at our mortality (I cannot recall how many times 'so it goes' is used, but it's so frequent that it becomes darkly funny) but also to remind us of, sadly, of what 'blips' we all are on this planet."

Well, thanks, but personally I didn't need to be reminded of that, and far from finding it "darkly funny" it struck me as predictable and annoying. Maybe I'm the only one out of step here, but it seems to me there's an element of the Emperor's new clothes about this novel - everyone agrees with everyone else what a work of genius it is, when really it's nothing of the kind.

I think it probably suffers from being a book of its time. Maybe back then the themes were fresh and new (although I doubt it – it was first published (in the UK) in 1970 by which time the other masters: Asimov; Heinlein; Bradbury; Clarke; Niven; Herbert … were all well into their stride) but now the writing seems amateurish and feeble. The themes of alien abduction, temporal dislocation, social dysfunction, have all been done before, or since, better. As a historical record of the privations of life in a prison camp, or the bombing of Dresden, the details are too sketchy to satisfy and the plot too thin to hold the attention. Did I say plot? The book reads like a French film – meandering along observing the actions and reactions of Pilgrim without a goal in sight and then ends with as big a whimper as it began.

Score up another one in the “I wouldn’t have read this unless I had to” category. Nothing in the synopsis, the flyleaf, or the first few pages would have induced me to pick up this bollocks unless I’d had the incentive of the book club, and even then I resent the fact that I could have more profitably used the time spent reading it.