Everest

Leo Tolstoy – War & Peace (1869)
Novel – 1,300 pages - my copy (paperback; 1998) bought for £2.99 in a charity shop in Liskeard, early 2008
- 4 nods out of 5 -

Tolstoy’s War & Peace is a mammoth book; the champion of heavyweights; a lord among giants; the Mount Everest of all novels. This paperback edition alone comprises over one thousand and three hundred pages, the book’s spine cracking near breaking point long before I reached the book’s climax.

So, what is it all about? The novel takes place between the years of 1805 to 1813 (with an epilogue expanding to the 1820s); a time in which Napoleon rules Europe, the result of which is the French invading Russian soil on their march to Moscow. As the title suggests, the reader is switched back and forth from the tranquil bourgeois life of the higher classes in Moscow and St Petersburg to the rough and tumble of the front line of war, beginning in Austerlitz in 1805 and ending on the battlefields in the heart of Russia.

There is a vast cast of characters, centring principally on two families (the warm hearted Rostovs and the austere Bolkonskys), as well as the loveable and confused Pierre Bezukhov. We witness the loves and broken hearts (and broken bones), the squabbles and matches of these characters throughout these years; such as Andrei’s supposed death, Natasha’s absconding with a rival lover, the angry and disciplined Prince Bolkonsky and the ever inquisitive Pierre’s travels and tribulations in society. It is reminiscent of traditional English family saga novels – an influence on Tolstoy – and his romantic ink can be easily viewed throughout, such as in Nicholas and Sonya’s kiss:

‘ "Quite different and yet the same," thought Nicholas looking at her face all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the cloak that covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and kissed her on the lips that wore a moustache and had a smell of burnt cork.’ (p.565).

The characters are alive and vibrant, yet this is not the total sum of the book. Tolstoy philosophises on life in combat and in general, the digressions becoming so numerous as the book proceeds that it is estimated that in Books Three and Four they fill one chapter in six, as well as the entirety of the second epilogue. This is reflected best in the thoughts and words of the characters, such as when Pierre reflects of life on the battlefield: ‘Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same – only to save oneself form it as best one can…. Only not to see it, that dreadful it!’ (p.575)

However, it is frustratingly worn into the book via Tolstoy direct; his mission seemingly to confront historians of the period and their bias on hailing Napoleon as a learned and magnificent leader. No, there is no such thing as a Great Man in History who decides the fate and destiny of millions of people - states Tolstoy – and he continues to hammer this point, much to the reader’s annoyance. His argument runs thus:

‘When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth, is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.’ (p.648).

Due to Tolstoy’s feud with the historians of the time this book – at times mesmerising and thrilling – suffers as a result. The author is hell-bent on the revision of the history:
‘Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable’ (p.840)

But is anything in life inevitable? Only death. The book is a large mammoth, and due to its scope and the years it took to write, it appears at times to be directionless – the pages being moved along only by the feet of the advancing French. There are many wasteful pages and it could have been suitably trimmed back. This may sound a sacrilegious suggestion, but I have the strength (or audacity?) to see the worth in the latest frenzy of abridged and shortened classic novels. The soul of the book’s pages could be preserved without the seemingly pointless events of Pierre’s jaunts with the Freemasons.

Yet War & Peace remains one of the heavyweights of the novel – even if some critics have concluded it may not, in fact, be a novel (this is shown in Tolstoy’s employment of mathematics in his philosophical discussions, for example: ‘Consequently the four were equal to the fifteen, and therefore 4x=15y. Consequently x/y=15/4…’ (p.1105)). It recently received the somewhat dubious honour of being ranked second on a list of books that people claimed to have read in order to impress people, number one belonging to Orwell’s 1984. Such is its vastness and quality, Tolstoy’s book will long continue to amaze and astonish the reader.