The Thick of It and Peep Show writer – and now novelist – chooses fiction from Tolstoy to Spike Milligan that finds black comedy amid the human tragedy of conflict
War isn’t funny, obviously. Soldiers fighting and dying; the killing of civilians by accident or design – all very not funny.
But there is another side to war: the behind-the-scenes confusions, the absurdities of large organisations, the hypocrisies and vanities of nations and individuals, the lies we tell ourselves and others, the organisational chaos, the swallowing up of the singular person in the war machine. To get at these other truths about wartime, a different register is necessary. Wars are hard to look at head-on. Emily Dickinson’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant” perhaps applies to nothing so much as conflict.
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