Overview

Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, went to war - The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare; of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

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Reviews

'The ferocious truth of a work of art.' The New Yorker 'The Wars is quite simply one of the best novels of the Great War. A magnificent book.' Province Vancouver

The madness of war, WW I variety and Equus-style - in an evocative but heavy-handedly contrived patchwork of lyrical-deadpan narrative and first-person transcripts. From the detached viewpoint of an unnamed researcher, Canadian Findley reconstructs the horror-legend of young, handsome, animal-loving Robert Ross - a Toronto lieutenant who goes to war already guilty (he blames himself for the recent death of his hydrocephalic sister), with much more guilt and death in store: on the ship to Europe, he has to shoot, clumsily, a sick horse (just as his neurotic mother ordered him to kill his dead sister's rabbits); in England, he sits endlessly by the bedside of a dying comrade; at Ypres, he survives being swallowed up in chlorine-drenched mud only to witness the unbelievable slaughter. Recovering back in Britain, he has a brief encounter (sex=violence) with a titled floozy who's in love with a British war hero - a hero doubly debased because Robert saw him being buggered back home in an Alberta whorehouse and because he ends up armless and a failed suicide. Though there are scenes of uncluttered power - a platoon survives gassing by covering their faces in cloth doused with their own urine - Findley is far too transparent as he accumulates and interconnects Robert's inner and outer horrors, not to mention the symbolic appearances of birds, rabbits, hedgehogs, and other innocent creatures. And this would-be mythmaking verges on parody when Robert, on the front again, is gang-raped by fellow officers in a bathhouse and then goes into his legendary freak-out: shooting and liberating horses, killing superior officers. Hero? Madman? A suspiciously familiar question, especially in equine company - and only one of the see-through pretensions that keep Findley's obvious talents from coming together in this uncertain blend of case history, war story, and allegory. (Kirkus Reviews)

This semi-fictional account of World War I from the viewpoint of a young Canadian officer was first published in 1977 and has since become author Timothy Findley's most celebrated achievement. The novel begins with one terrifying, iconic image - a man on horseback, his clothes and hair on fire. From then on it's written almost like a psychological thriller, hinting at the fate of the court-martialled Robert Ross without revealing his 'crime' until the end of the novel. His story unfolds through a series of flashbacks, interview transcripts and journal entries. It traces his life from a dysfunctional upbringing in Toronto through the living hell of the trenches, abuse by his fellow soldiers, a friendship with a child and a grim love affair with an icy aristocrat, to arrive at last at the act of compassion which leads to his destruction. Findlay used family papers and photographs as the basis of the novel, which has at its centre both the ruin of a generation and the sacrifice of one man's innocence. Elemental imagery suffuses the telling: the fires of destruction, the drowning mud, the poisoned winds and sulphurous rains. One of the great novels of war from a sensitive and elegant writer. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Timothy Findley was born in Toronto in 1930. His first career was in the theatre; he was a charter company member of Ontario's Stratford Shakespearean Festival in 1953, and toured several European capitals.In 1963, Findley turned to writing full-time and in 1977 his third novel, The Wars, won a Governor General's Award. It is now considered a Canadian classic. Following his bestsellers such as Famous Last Words, he won an Edgar Award for The Telling of Lies, while his collection of short stories, Stones, won Ontario's Trillium Award.Findley's first work of non-fiction, Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Workbook, made him the first two-time winner of a Canadian Authors Association Award; he had earlier won its fiction counterpart for his novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage. He has also written plays, and his third, The Stillborn Lover (1993), won the CAA Drama Award, as well as winning an Arthur Ellis Award and

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