Here’s some shouting — STEVEN HARDESTY

Every novel offers the same thing - the chance to jump into a fabulous new world and there discover a surprise dream and a fresh understanding of how human beings work. Am I right?

True, some novelists work it all backwards and that can read crazy. Some do it inside out and that’s just weird. But I discovered to my surprise that I am boldly different: No matter what genre I choose in which to tell a story - and I write Westerns, romcoms, space opera and anything else that promises fun - I always tell the same story. A story of war with life.

After all, how better to capture a dream and an understanding of human beings than in a war story that is not a war story but something very different?

I got to thinking about all this the other day when I hit the halfway mark in drafting a new novel. An historical Western called Cradle of the Wind about a buffalo hunter off the Great Plains tracking down the mystery of a woman’s lost head. Halfway through the manuscript was the point at which I realized I was writing two books on the same page.

After a good many years’ writing in whatever genre pleased me at the moment, and thinking what a clever fellow I am, I realized that I’ve been writing just one story all along. The story of my Vietnam war.

Yes, I’ve written four war novels. But that war crept into everything else I wrote - the romantic thriller Woman on Fire, the sci-fi/fantasy The Prince of Cowards, the horror In the Season of Poison, even comic capers like The Feathered Virgin. And now Cradle of the Wind.

In all those non-war stories, I tell just a bit of the everyday horrors and miseries of war. Only once did I try to tell the bigger, scarier truth of what happens to a soldier and his family when a war is done, and that was in a non-war war novel called Poisoned Hearts.

Now, half through the writing of Cradle of the Wind - set in the Old West in those hard, unsettled years after the U.S. Civil War and the collapse of Reconstruction - I discovered myself writing a post-war war novel with no chance of escape back to the Wild West romp I’d originally intended to write.

I refuse to take all the blame, though. Two books boosted me to understand any novel, including Cradle, can be and probably ought to be more than just a romp. First was the beautifully written West with the Night, Beryl Markham’s 1942 memoir of Africa and early aviation. There is war in it - the Great War - but not much. What struck me was its depth of understanding of narrative and swift characterization of complex characters. And, behind it all, something much more than one woman’s adventure - a casual courage and fixed determination.

At the same time, I read Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel The Passenger (1938) about a man trying to outrun the Holocaust but betrayed on all sides and by his own confusion and indecision. Boschwitz himself escaped Nazi Germany but died in a U-boat attack in the North Atlantic. His story of a man’s desperate inability to accept a bitter reality and his sinking into a kind of self-betrayal is stunning for the silent question it asks - “Me, too?”.

As relief from the bright and gloomy shocks of these two books, I took up Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, a book I’ve never been able to read much past the first chapters although I’m a Brautigan fan. Big mistake. Here’s a classic lighthearted story that offers up the unhappy possibility that all life is a child’s prank. Brrr.

Markham and Boschwitz, and Brautigan, made me realize that when a thing needs to be said it must be shouted out or no one will bother to listen. So Cradle of the Wind is going to do some shouting. Or so I hope.