books

There are war novels that try to make sense of the thing, and then there is Slaughterhouse-Five, which gives up on sense entirely and is stronger for it. Vonnegut opens with what amounts to a disclaimer: this is the book he had been trying to write since 1945, when he survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden in the cellar of a slaughterhouse, and it is, he announces, a failure, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The book that follows proves him both right and wrong. It cannot explain Dresden. What it can do, and does with astonishing economy, is transmit the shape of the wound.

The conceit is by now famous. Billy Pilgrim, a mild optometrist from Ilium, New York, has come unstuck in time. He ricochets between his ordinary postwar life, his captivity as a prisoner of war, his death, his childhood, and a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed naked alongside a film actress while four-dimensional aliens explain that every moment has always existed and always will. Read one way, this is science fiction. Read another, and it is the most accurate portrait of post-traumatic stress ever committed to paper, a man whose mind will not stop pinballing through the worst days of his life because it has nowhere safer to land. Both readings sit comfortably inside the book. That is part of its strange genius.

What strikes hardest on rereading is the prose. Vonnegut writes in short, plain, declarative blocks - each scene trimmed to the bone, each section separated by a white space that functions almost like a breath. The refrain "So it goes," which follows every death in the book and appears more than a hundred times, should wear thin and somehow never does. It is a shrug, a prayer, a mode of survival, and a quiet indictment of the reader who might be tempted to look away. Around it, Vonnegut arranges a procession of small, devastating set pieces: the execution of poor Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot after a city has been annihilated; the British officers putting on a production of Cinderella in the camp; the corpse mines of Dresden.

The book is not without friction. The fractured structure can feel wilfully disjointed on a first read, and the Tralfamadorian passages veer close to whimsy that jars against the atrocity at the novel's centre - a tension some take as a flaw and others as the entire point. The fatalism of "everything is structured that way" is, Vonnegut makes quietly clear, a lie Billy needs in order to function, not a philosophy the book endorses. Miss this and the novel can seem to shrug at horrors it is actually cataloguing with fury.

Fifty-odd years on, it has survived banning attempts, canonisation, and its own reputation, and it still reads as something genuinely strange - funny in places that should not be funny, tender where you brace for cynicism, and finally very hard to put down. A small book that carries an enormous weight, and does so by refusing, gracefully, to pretend it can.