Delia Falconer writes beautifully. And her new book, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is beautifully written. Yet for all its elegance and craft, there is something missing from the book: a plot.
The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is a slender volume, more an elegy or a poem than a novel. It captures the essence of a soldier's life in and around the battlefield, not on it, and does this well. It captures the mundanity and profanity of everyday soldier life, leavened with the deeper thinking that only a soldier's sense of imminent mortality can bring. And yet, there is very little plot, only the remembrances of a former soldier, Frederick Benteen, composing correspondence.
To be fair to Delia Falconer - and to Frederick Benteen, the story's narrator - this is what she, in him, sets out to do. In his words,
"He wants to write the lost thoughts of soldiers. Not the grand story, he has never known his life in this way, but the seams and spaces in between. This is a history too, he thinks, the weight of gathered thoughts, the cumulus of idle moments".
And while the fragments of life are significant, there needs to be a greater sense of how these moments and thoughts hang together. A string of pearls only becomes a necklace on the string; otherwise it is just a handful of pearls. The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers needs a plot on which to string its pearls. This is true not just for the novel and its protagonist, but for us in our lives. Benteen misses the sense of life having more to offer than the here and now or the there and then. We ought not.
In her interview in the Good Weekend recently, Falconer conveyed her difficulty in writing,
"I'm very good at writing subplot; I can get lost in a labyrinth of fragments of minor characters, small incidents, glimpses of details. How to tell the main story in a highly individual voice with a beginning, middle and end is the hardest part".
Falconer's words are apt in describing her novel. It really is about the lost thoughts of soldiers, that which goes missing when the bigger story is written. It is a book that focuses on the unheralded, those just out of the frame. It gives a voice to the otherwise forgotten or marginalised and this is its significant strength.
Malcolm Knox writes of Falconer and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers saying, "the line-by-line power of her writing is so moving, you slow down to savour it". It is a book to savour, its brevity means that if you don't, you will have finished before you realise that you have started.
Falconer has the sparse writing style of Cormac McCarthy, but in reverse. His works are laden with ideas and spartan in detail, Falconer's, voluptuous in detail and spartan in plot. The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is a wonderful 140-page poem. Enjoy it for the writing; enjoy it for its attempt at trying to break new ground in writing the non-story as the story, but don't pretend that it's a novel and that way instead of being disappointed, you'll enjoy it as it is, a poem.
