Slaughterhouse-Five
By: Kurt Vonnegut / Narrated By: James Franco
Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
Awesome, in spite of the lackluster narration, but… So it goes…
I’ve studiously avoided Vonnegut for yeeeears, despite my own Pop’s love of the man and his writing, esPECially of Slaughterhouse-Five (“I’m coming, Billy!” from Valencia’s car crash scenes in the movie became a running joke for him). I know I know, I’ve reviewed him once for the website, but seriously, I’m sooo late to the Vonnegut game. But this book is an Accomplice Fave, and our 3rd year anniversary celebration is aaaallll about y’all, so here goes…
First, lemme just say that again, for yeeeears, I coulda sworn that Audible’s offering of this book was narrated by Ethan Hawke, and I sooo shoulda bought his version but did not as it was never on sale. Now, the only available version is done by actor-of-note James Franco, and a more unenthusiastic performer would be impossible to find. I’m giving him the benefit of the VERY HUGE doubt by couching such plodding tones by this: This story is of one man telling another man’s story, and the first man has survived PTSD after WWII/the bombing of Dresden and has learned to cope by detaching, like, compLETEly. That would make Franco’s uninspired timbre acceptable, would make it bearable to listen to the barely 5-hours of this book.
Okay, away from the unfortunate performance and on to this classic kinda sorta anti-war book (Which might as well be anti-glacier one person tells the somewhat unreliable narrator as war is just a fact of life on this planet).
It opens by a character, ostensibly Vonnegut himself, talking about his twenty-year devotion to write THE Book on the Bombing of Dresden, an experience that stood out amongst all the atrocities seen during the war. He tells the wife of an old war-buddy of his that it will be called “The Children’s Crusade” as he agrees with her; this will not be about valorous men fighting a glorious war, but it will be about babies sent off to commit murder, suffer greatly.
The character is the rather pitiful Billy Pilgrim who spends the novel Time/Universe hopping: Between various eras in his life and between Earth and the planet Tralfamadore. We see Billy and his personal life, his experiences with his wife, his family life, his career as a somewhat befuddled and successful optometrist. But mostly, Billy keeps landing on his time in WWII where he was sent overseas as a chaplain’s assistant/noncombatant who is thrust into the war, eventually being captured. As part of forced labor, he works in Dresden where he and his fellow prisoners are kept in an old slaughterhouse (Five). Dresden is thought to be an Untouchable city, where its glories and history will keep it safe from the extensive bombing.
Not for long.
The firebombings send the prison crew back to their slaughterhouse where they’re kept somewhat safe as they hunker down aside a few carcasses of dead animals, hung from meathooks. The world they go back into is completely devastated, rubble as far as the eye can see, scorched and mangled bodies strewn about the place. The guards set them on a detail retrieving corpses from bomb shelters, where the dead are too numerous to do anything about, other than pile the bodies in heaps, torching and burning them.
While the time-hopping seems to be a kinda sorta PTSD, the Universe-hopping appears soon after a plane crash leaves Billy with a head injury. On Tralfamadore, he’s placed in a zoo where he’s viewed by the planet’s inhabitants as a human specimen. Soon, he’s joined by another abducted earthling, a model and porn star named Montana Wildhack, who’s brought to the zoo to mate with Billy. Here is the only time that Billy knows true intimacy, usually being unutterably bored with his placid wife Valencia. But he’s zipped back to Earth, bringing knowledge of Tralfamadorian Life Views with him, which he hopes will help Earth’s people (And indeed, in a Future-Moment, we see that he’s speaking to large audiences, announcing his own foretold death with the declaration that it will not be a moment of distress as he will continue to exist, in better circumstances, along a time continuum).
While I chortled a lot, as Vonnegut is (I know I know, WAS as of his death in 2007) one HELLuva wry writer, his somewhat calm and choppy writing kept creeping up on me, smacking me upside the head with emotional reactions such as dread, sorrow, horror, empathy. And truly, is one to laugh or cry? There’s no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was an atrocity (A NECESSARY one a character posits), but Billy and our unreliable narrator seem to hold many facts in many hands: Germans slaughtering Jews held alongside children torched on the streets, to go alongside the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many many hats being worn, but one is left with the bleak knowledge that man’s inhumanity to man is endless, is perpetual, will never stop, world without end.
I hit Wikipedia for the various themes, and I found soooo many conjectures as to what-all Slaughterhouse-Five is s’posed to mean and whatnot, but I think it works best if one just reads it and lets it flow over the self as is, no great intentions searched for. A man experiences brutality and great suffering, sees the same wherever he goes, feels friendship for the doomed, doesn’t know how to live after having to be dead to survive. He finds meaning from cheesy sci-fi, time-hopping, learning that the best way to survive is by thinking of Fate instead of Free Will, and that if we could just see Existence as being In the Past, always and forever, maybe the unfortunate Present/Now could be just an inconvenient blip.
Truly, this can be a rather mind-blowing little book, full of the tragedy of Irony (Valencia dying of carbon monoxide poisoning after crashing her way to see Death’s Door Billy anyone?) and with the simple pathos of having actual feelings before realizing that they cause excruciating pain if one doesn’t numb immediately.
And how can one call such enjoyable?
Well it is.
Just get over the urge to whonk James Franco on the head every now again.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.