No-One Thinks Of Greenland
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
1959. The Korean War has been over for six years. Corporal Rudy Spruance, thanks to a little hometown trouble, has just enlisted in the U.S. Army.
The next thing he knows he is being savaged by mosquitoes in one of the most remote places in the world, a military hospital in Qangattarsa, Greenland that doesn't officially exist. "You'll want to scratch," he is told when he wakes up in one of the beds. But Rudy wants to do more than scratch. He wants to know what this strange place is for and why he's there.
And then he discovers the Wing. The Wing is a room of dead people who are still alive - the remnants of American soldiers in Korea whose hearts somehow still beat, men who have been reduced to mere portions of humans. They are too damaged to ever send home and their families believe them gone. It's the most peaceful place Rudy has ever been, and he befriends the only mentally coherent inhabitant, Guy X.
Rudy also falls in love with Irene, a sergeant. And he finds himself starting up a base newspaper. And all the time the days are getting shorter. Soon the Stark Raving Dark of permanent night will be upon them all. As things degenerate and the future of Qangattarsa and the men who live their strange half-lives there becomes increasingly doubtful, Rudy realises he must find a way to save the people he loves - and himself.
This is a moving, powerful and very funny portrait of human absurdity and tragedy that joins Catch-22 as a classic of its kind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's 1959 at the start of this intelligent first novel, and the Korean War has been over for six years, but the horribly mutilated casualties hidden away in an obscure military hospital on the U.S. Army base at Qangattarsa, Greenland, are still living with its consequences. The Wing, as the hospital is called, is run by Col. Lane Woolwrap, a half-mad bureaucratic genius who equips the place with oak paneling and Tiffany lamps. Assigned to his command is army misfit Rudy Spruance, an information officer relegated to Qangattarsa for reasons unknown. Woolwrap orders Rudy to start a newspaper to boost morale, but Rudy's journalistic investigations uncover unpleasant facts about the history and the future of the hospital's patients. Qangattarsa is a mysterious and disorienting place, and the harsh Greenland landscape undermines the soldiers' sanity; glaciers move menacingly in the night, hordes of mosquitoes attack and the long polar darkness of winter is hard to bear. Griesemer is at his best describing the strange recreational activities that occupy the Greenland troops: chasing polar bears in jeeps, throwing beer blasts that degenerate into fistfights and public nudity. In its manic moments, the book recalls the topsy-turvy military worlds of Catch-22and M*A*S*H, though it doesn't quite reach the subversive heights of its predecessors. Rudy's love affair with Sgt. Irene Teal, the colonel's aide and companion, is conventional, and where Heller's Yossarian was an inspired antihero, forging his own moral code in order to cope with his surreal surroundings, Rudy takes a more standard route, fighting for the weak against a malevolent system. Still, his struggle is a compelling one, as post Korea and Vietnam revelations make the conspiracies imagined here near-plausible. Regional author tour.
