A Question Of Decency | The Repair the World

Adds a new perspective | The Repair the World | Peter Ullian

books:


	• The Repair the World Peter Ullian Amazon, 2007 - 8 pages average customer review:based on 254 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Joseph Heller meets Garth Ennis

Ullian has a talent for balancing the absurd and the tragic, to grimly wry effect. His cast of warriors, juiced on action movies, porn and video games, would seem like some out-there postmodern creation if they weren't so obviously reflective of the America they came from. Instead, the author has created a narrative of soldiers as products of the American culture they have come to spread. Ullian's portrait is ambivalent-- there's no denying the dark edge of his soldiers' sex-and-violence media mikvah in preparation for battle, but the men themselves remain reflective, human and sympathetic.

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A Question Of Decency

I was an undergrad theatre major at the University of Iowa when Peter was a grad playwriting student there. His plays were entertaining, often darkly funny, grounded in a strong sense of narrative, and most of all intensely focused on ethical concerns... in particular the fundamental question of how to be a decent person when faced with untenable choices. It seems appropriate that he would turn his attention to the current Iraq war, which unfortunately provides many ways to explore that question on both a macro and micro scale.

I've only read the excerpt provided online here, but I was very engaged by the story and curious to find out where the war would take these fictional people. I found myself hoping that the character of Ryder finds a way to retain his humanity in a dehumanizing situation. More than that, I hope that Peter's work gets the chance to reach the wider audience it deserves.

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Adds a new perspective

This excerpt does a great job revealing the realities of war. It provides the perspective of the ones on the front line and does a wonderful job displaying the uncertainties that go along with warfare; however, it was a bit hard to follow at times, and it seemed a little "jumpy". Overall, great job!

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Situational Deconstruction

I want to read more, to find out where Peter Ullian's deconstruction of situational ethics comes to rest, or if it does at all. Regarding comments about gratuitous sex and violence in Ullian's narrative: first of all, there isn't really any sex. The male characters think about sex constantly, which is what most men do in real life. As for the violence - exploding arms, dead kids - that sort of insanity happens every day in Iraq. It happened every day in Vietnam. I'm sure it's happening all over the world as we speak... and plenty of times there aren't even any American troops involved.

Okay, here's my armchair review:

With incongruous detachment, Ullian depicts an existence where "real" is a trainwreck of people and processes that don't belong together, and "ideal" is a faraway abstraction that propels the world like an invisible puppetmaster. Soldiers allegedly sent to free the Iraqi people from a tyrant train to do so by watching porn and listening to death-metal (apparently, that's typical in reality - during the Gulf War, Slayer was used as a soundtrack for Marine training maneuvers in Saudi Arabia). The only in-depth discussion among the characters is about country music. Cross-cultural understanding? Forget it. Would any of these guys bother to learn Arabic or read about the Five Pillars of Islam? I don't think so. The people they've been told they're freeing are "impassive, inscrutable" (from narrative). In a situation requiring immediate action, the unit leader lets his mind wander into random associations and memories, to the point where the "embedded" female journalist accompanying the unit has to render medical attention to another soldier.

I want to know where Ullian is going with this. The absurdity of existence? The ultimate subjectivity of moral/ethical frameworks? The pointlessness of nationalism? Is there a political agenda? Is the message here that everyone just bad and clueless? I'm curious now.

My first of two beefs with Ullian's prose is that his characters' dialogue is a little too Pynchon-esque: affected overemphasis and a deliberate lack of contractions. My second beef is that the characters' memories are less, well, personal than they could be. If Ullian is trying to convey his views on politics and society through the recollections of characters, and sometimes it's a little stilted.

Overall, I was intrigued and I want to read the rest of it.

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Soldier Richard Ryder travels from the battlefields of Iraq to the heart of a tropical rainforest on a quixotic quest to retrieve Saddam Hussein's non-existent WMD, trying to retain his moral bearings as he encounters situations that veer drastically from the tragic to the absurd.