"}Title: The Last Samurai: The Life of Lawrence of Arabia
Author: Peter O'Toole
Rating: 3/5 stars
At times it\u2019s very difficult to tell what O'Toole is trying to do with this novel, because it\u2019s an intensely episodic and impressionistic work. The result is that it\u2019s hard to read in a focused way, and the only way in which the impressionistic qualities can be made to work is with the book\u2019s central character \u2013 Lawrence of Arabia.
This doesn\u2019t mean O'Toole wants to tell a story, so much as it means that the story Lawrence of Arabia tells is simply very compelling. You will end up constantly pausing or skipping over the boring parts of the text.
For the most part, O'Toole gives us a picture of Lawrence as a tormented human being whose life is almost a series of traumas rather than a coherent narrative. We start out with the Lawrence who is a kind, gentle man, and we meet the man who was a brilliant, sensitive soldier. And we see him go to the Eastern Front, the first time he went to the Eastern Front, and come back. And the next time, and the next time, and so on and so forth. This part of the book is called \u201cThe Man Who Was Always There.\u201d
The war becomes a kind of nightmare for him, a nightmare that includes a \u201chell week\u201d of constant exposure to shellfire. And then one day he\u2019s back in his tent, writing:
\u201cAfter months spent, alone in a desolate desert, and, by the way, I was in the desert a lot. That was probably one reason I thought of myself as Lawrence of Arabia \u2013 I was in the desert a great deal, and I thought I should get a sort of glamour and mystique out of it. \u2018He\u2019s in the desert all the time, doing nothing, always alone,\u2019 you know? Which was a bit of a fantasy of mine, anyway.\u201d(O'Toole calls Lawrence\u2019s obsession with his desert, with the isolation in which he finds himself, his \u201cmystique.\u201d)
In the last part of the book, \u201cThe Man Who Made Things Up,\u201d we get a Lawrence who, having returned to England for the last time, finds that he can no longer deal with the horror of war. He says that he wants to retire to a monastery \u2013 his last \u201cdesert\u201d had been the monastery. But the horrors of war have begun to seep in. He\u2019s still tormented by memories of battle \u2013 \u201cOh God, I was on the Somme.\u201d When he talks to an old friend, we hear:
\u201c'You\u2019re mad,\u2019 says he [his friend], who is very fond of him. ‘We\u2019ve all become mad in this terrible war. You\u2019re making a bloody mess of yourself. I want you to go back with me and rest for a while.\u2019“I said, 'I\u2019d like to go into a monastery where I could be quiet and live without fighting,\u2019 and he said, 'You know the King would never allow you to retire in peace.\u2019
This is the last bit of the book. We end with Lawrence on his deathbed, and we get a series of brief, evocative scenes of his dying. But we\u2019re still left with the last line of the book: "For some time, he lay there without moving, as if his body, even his heart, was holding back, refusing to rest until the moment when he himself would leave.\u201d
These evocations of battle and of the dead \u2013 they work. But they do not capture the whole of the experience, and they do not make us feel like we\u2019re getting to know Lawrence as a human being.
All in all, this is a good story, a very good story, but the kind of story that O'Toole tells doesn\u2019t lend itself very well to book review. You\u2019ll just have to read it.
(There\u2019s some good stuff in the introduction, but I would prefer to discuss that separately, in more depth than I\u2019m in a position to do. I may do that if I have a bit more time in the future.)
(I would say, though, that this book is an instance of a broader problem in American publishing: the tendency to tell great stories, and to present them in ways that are more or less true to the experience. There is some evidence that these books sell more copies than any other kind of novel, and so there is a lot of pressure to create a new kind of story, one that presents these stories as the most important kind of stories.)
(I\u2019m in no way complaining about \u201cthe problem with publishing is getting books out there.\u201d I think this one did well because it had a particular kind of subject matter, and got publicity for it. My point is that, sometimes, one story is actually good enough, and the other is just a lot more interesting.)