Book Review: A 'War' That's Not About Oil

War -- the second novel by author/filmmaker Todd Komarnicki -- follows the narrative of an unnamed soldier through a city made unrecognizable by prolonged conflict, guided only by his instincts and the vague notion of military responsibility. But as the soldier endeavors deeper into the embattled landscape, and as his solitude and the constant threat of death begin to chip away at his spartan resolve, he is forced to confront the horrors of his past in order to find the will to survive the present.

Like his first novel, Famine, Komarnicki's wildly inventive prose creates a visceral and mesmerizing experience in war. Bordering on playful at times, the author's style is incredibly satisfying to the engaged reader. (Of one character the narrator says, "she was thin on the top and wide on the bottom, as if someone had tried to yank her up and out of herself through the eye of a needle and failed.") These palpable descriptions are offset by flashbacks of pastoral beauty and observations of stunning horror. Reading war is akin to watching a beautifully shot film with the reel spinning wildly out of control and the projector slipping in and out of focus: people lose their identifying features, voices appear from mid-air as in half-dreams, objects become ethereal to the touch, and the setting somehow seems both vaguely familiar and desolately foreign. It is a masterpiece of the surreal, blending the styles of mystery, thriller, and memoir to paint a narrative that is by turns sentimental and harrowing.

Though Komarnicki takes several opportunities to hint at our society's pilgrimage along the path to annihilation (in response to a woman apologizing for speaking too loudly, the narrator retorts, "Everyone does. Eventually all we'll have is yelling and email"), his subtlety ends there. The author's talents truly come alive in moments of sheer gun-in-the-face horror, as when the narrator steps on a landmine and realizes his leg's "solidity for the very first time, just before the shrapnel spiked up through the skin." And it is with these moments of near-destruction that the author's work -- his characters, his setting -- take on new life as well.

The war itself is a MacGuffin -- the players on the stage are never named, and the setting is only revealed for emphasis in the novel's stunning conclusion. Rather, it is the destruction and misery caused by the war that compels both the story and the reader. As much as war could be interpreted as an indictment on our country's own military prowess ("We were never given a score, only told that we were being tested"), the writer is careful not to make the war's pointlessness his focus. Rather, Komarnicki's masterpiece is much more than social commentary: it is a heartrendering story about loss, fear, hope, reconciliation, and -- ultimately -- our own elusive humanity.


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Chris Steib served as editor-in-chief of the successful online lit-mag Void during its initial two-year run. Now a digital product manager by day, he is also an intermittently voracious reader (50 books, here he comes), and writer of novels unread.