Donald Jack - Three Cheers For Me

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Surprisingly good

I enjoyed Three Cheers For Me a good deal more than I expected to.  I  tried it because P.G. Wodehouse thought highly of it, but I didn't really know whether I would like it.  In fact (after a rather tedious opening chapter or two), I found it readable, funny in places and genuinely touching in others.  It had elements of Wodehouse himself, Jerome K. Jerome, Siegfried Sassoon and Cecil Lewis; to my surprise, as well as the humour it gave a powerful, exciting and sometimes moving picture of fighting in the First World War.

The story begins in 1916.  It is narrated by Bartholemew Bandy, a naïve, gauche Canadian who enlists in the army to fight in France.  He is, of course, hopelessly incompetent, but eventually enlists in the RFC and becomes a pilot.  He remains socially inept but finds that in the air he is a brilliant flyer.  This gives rise to both comic and genuinely exciting situations.

Although this is billed as a comedy and some parts are genuinely funny, it is the descriptions of life and action at the Front at the Somme and Ypres, and of aerial combat which I found the best parts of this book.  These episodes are, in a way, partly comic, but all the more affecting for being so.  "Bandy" talks in some places about out-and-out farcical events like wrestling with ancient plumbing in a country house, which reminded me strongly of Three Men In  A Boat.  In other parts, he uses a similar tone to describe a group of bewildered infantrymen fighting their way into an enemy trench and not knowing what to do, his own terror-induced clumsiness and ineptitude when taking off for his first flight into genuine action and the thrill of flying once he has become extremely skilled at it.  The deadpan style lends these things immediacy and real pathos, I think, and through it all Jack creates very believable characters about whom we come to care, and when some are inevitably killed, their loss – described in quiet matter-of-fact tones – genuinely saddened me.

I was surprised to find that these stories were written as late as 1962.  They have the feel of having been written by someone who was really there.  Jack was in the RAF in the Second World War so his knowledge of flying is intimate, but it is still a considerable achievement to have created such an intimate portrait of an earlier time.

So, this is a mixture of the farcical and the deadly serious.  It takes real skill to pull that off successfully, and Jack manages it very well.  He was a fine writer and this is an enjoyable and memorable book.  I'll be looking out for more by Donald Jack, and I can recommend this warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)