A Different Kind of Sentinel in Review

There are some fas­ci­nat­ing ideas here. The author uses the spring­board of a navy hear­ing to cre­ate a mem­oir of a dif­fi­cult life; a bit Joycean both in the col­laps­ing of a per­son­al­ity down into less than a day’s worth of time, and in the sud­den drops into fan­tasy. These are not, unsur­pris­ingly, han­dled as well as Joyce, but then the over­all pat­tern of the book is a lot more clear than Ulysses, too, and per­haps Drury’s attempt at com­bin­ing read­abil­ity with a jar­ring fan­tasy life isn’t as unsuc­cess­ful as it could have been.

Some of the lit­er­ary devices come across really well; one metaphor­i­cal descrip­tion of a mas­tur­ba­tory expe­ri­ence had me snick­er­ing like a school­boy and being impressed by the com­mand of lan­guage at the same time. There’s an inter­est­ing gim­mick where con­ver­sa­tions, prob­a­bly orginally just a few words, between the pro­tag­o­nist and his ship­board com­pan­ions are exploded into long Socratic dialogs. And some of the jumps from the real world to the world-​​inside-​​the-​​mind are han­dled well.

In many places it’s hard to say where the line falls between fan­tasy and real­ity. A lot of the early sec­tions of the book read more like the author self-​​justifying his own lack of respon­si­bil­ity; but as the end approaches the point comes out, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, that that lack was actu­ally a symp­tom of the author’s aware­ness of the evils of gov­ern­ments and militaries.

All very 60’s-hip. But for all the nice lit­er­ary devices, the book lacks a cer­tain flow to it. There’s no real sense that we march steadily towards a cli­max; some events hap­pen and then other events hap­pen, and then the book ends. I sus­pect the goal of a mem­oir was prob­a­bly met, but mov­ing far­ther away from the actual events might have pro­vided a bet­ter story. And other prob­lems crop up, such as the jar­ring and incon­sis­tent attempts at ver­nac­u­lar. So while I have a lot of respect for the author to be able to put together this book, and make a solid attempt at cre­at­ing lit­er­a­ture rather than just hack­ing some­thing out, in the end I didn’t enjoy it all that much. Maybe that’s just the des­tiny of great lit­er­a­ture in its own time.