The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck, Milkweed Editions, 192 pp
The plot of Matthew Eck’s The Farther Shore could hardly be simpler. A handful of American soldiers are abandoned in an African city torn apart by civil war, and their only hope for survival is a perilous journey through the city and all its many dangers.
Along the way there are the prerequisite staples of serious war literature; the unintentional ‘collateral damage’, in this case the mistaken killing of two children that sets off the tragic events of the novel, the native who had once spent time in America; and the author’s stubborn refusal to assign moral judgments to the actions he depicts.
On the surface, that sounds like an indictment of the novel. On the contrary; it takes a skilled hand to take the clichés of a genre and morph them into something fresh and intriguing. Eck manages to pull if off with a austere simplicity and ease that belies the fact that he is a first time novelist.
While its stark and bare-bone style is reminiscent of Harry Brown’s WWII Italy in A Walk in the Sun, Eck tells the story of a modern day conflict, albeit one never identified by year or name.
The story centers on Joshua Stantz, an Army sergeant and one of four soldiers left behind after a botched mission leaves two children dead. Among the group Josh can claim a certain detachment – by chance he never opened fire on the children – but there is no doubt he is weighed down by the same guilt and sense of impending doom that plague the rest.
“ . . my thoughts turned to times when I hadn’t done enough to save others as they . . . disappeared beneath the waves of this world. And there I was standing on the farther shore, hoping they would surface again.”
Separated from the Army and with no immediate hope for rescue the group begins a cross town odyssey to the imagined safety of a nearby city. The characters and events that spring forth along this journey both shape their future and illuminate the mistakes of their immediate past.
“We made a mess of this whole thing,” one character says. “And I’m sick with it.”
It’s left up to the readers imagination – and political inclination – to decipher whether or not the book stands as an indictment of the current occupation of Iraq.
Eck himself may not absolve the Americans of the novel of the chaos they created, but he also doesn’t canonize the violent inhabitants of the city. In one disturbing scene a couple is viscously attacked and mutilated for a act of adultery, and at one point Stantz wonders why a nation that has such high rainfall totals fails to grow enough crops to feed its own starving people.
If there is one complaint about the book, it’s that the journey Stantz and company undertake doesn’t seem all that terror inducing. Despite being hunted by most of the city they are able to travel in the open with seeming ease, covering multiple miles and rarely encountering even mild opposition.
It’s a disturbingly surreal journey, one that at times seems no more foreign, no more dangerous, than a similar walk in some parts of America.
More than once the American characters fear that their actions will ‘follow them home’.
Perhaps that’s Eck’s point - that once we become entangled in the politics and bloodshed of another land it becomes impossible to separate ourselves from the conflict, physically or spiritually.
For Stantz and the other survivors, their private war will indeed ‘follow them home’.
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Tags: book review, Matthew Eck, The Farther Shore
