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thedrifter
11-24-07, 08:31 AM
November 25, 2007
A Soldier’s Tale
By UZODINMA IWEALA

THE FARTHER SHORE

By Matthew Eck.

176 pp. Milkweed Editions. $22.

We’re all familiar with the pictures of American servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. We’ve seen the movies and television programs inspired by this tragic event and have read the books and newspaper and magazine articles that analyze how Somalia changed the United States’ attitude toward military intervention, at least in the 1990s. But we haven’t read the fiction inspired by this crucial moment in American military history — because there has been so little.

Matthew Eck’s first novel helps fill this gap. It’s also one of the few creative works about the Somali conflict that doesn’t center on the downed Black Hawk helicopter and the 18 marines who died trying to capture the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. At the center of “The Farther Shore” is its narrator, Sgt. Josh Stantz, a young man from Kansas who admits that he joined the Army to pay for his education. Far from an ideal soldier (“Don’t be a hero,” his father tells him. “Just do what you can to get back here”), Stantz seems more focused on leaving the nightmare of Mogadishu than on completing the mission at hand. The other soldiers in his unit aren’t much different.

From the rooftop of an abandoned building, they lie on their stomachs watching the city and brooding about how awful it is — until two Somali boys stumble on their position, scaring them into an action that will completely change their mission and their lives. When Stantz and three others miss their rendezvous with a helicopter, their musings on the horror of Mogadishu are transformed into a real-life situation that seems to increase in absurdity the longer they linger in this place where “ruin travels fast.”

Eck has served in the military in Somalia, and the strongest aspect of this novel is his ability to bring us straight into the devastation, all its sights and sounds whirling around us as they whirl around Stantz and his comrades. In what was once a thriving city, “people sat in doorways and gathered around fires that were burning in the streets.” Bushes and trees grow in the middle of once-bustling boulevards. What used to be a handsome soccer stadium now looks like a “machine that had broken down.”

The stunned citizens of Mogadishu also seem to have shut down, no longer able to experience a full range of emotions. The fear of death lacks the same power “in this city where people were routinely hacked up with machetes, shot in the streets.” Even famine and disease are routine: “They’d seen it all before.” Though Stantz and his fellow soldiers try to remain composed, they too succumb to the chaos. All that governs Mogadishu, an American sniper informs them, is “ruin and the rhythm of ruin.”

Eck’s writing could also use more rhythm, and more emotional emphasis. Sometimes awkward and stilted, his prose can stumble over itself. While this ungainliness is partly due to Stantz’s deliberately numbed voice, it hints at a larger problem. The mental landscapes Eck’s characters inhabit are mostly two-dimensional, and the reader keeps hoping to see both the Americans and the Somalis as more than mere victims of circumstance. Life in Mogadishu may rob people of options, but it’s difficult to feel connected to those who appear to have no agency. We want to see at least a gesture of struggle against circumstance, not an adaptation to horrible circumstance after horrible circumstance.

Although “The Farther Shore” isn’t meant to be a thriller, it inevitably summons a certain degree of tension. Every door that must be opened, every corner that must be turned could lead to danger. Eck’s writing is best when it vivifies the danger: making us feel the heat of the explosions, see the billowing black smoke or hear the sound of an antiaircraft gun “burping its rounds off randomly.”

The larger question posed by “The Farther Shore” is what America and its soldiers hope to accomplish in such an environment. “This used to be a nice city,” a Somali tells Stantz and his fellow soldiers. “But now everyone is a criminal. ... And you think you can make it better?” Can we really offer help in a place we know nothing about, to a people we don’t understand? This question would seem to have resonance well beyond Mogadishu.

Uzodinma Iweala is the author of the novel “Beasts of No Nation.”

Ellie