This week’s book was written in the mid 1960s by one of my favourite authors and is my second-favourite book by him. While it might not top of the list of yours truly, it is probably his best-known work. The book is Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death. The author is, of course, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Slaughterhouse Five is known for its anti-war sentiments, particularly its savage satirical chronicling of the Dresden fire-bombing of February 1945. But it’s not strictly an anti-war novel. Nor is it strictly a novel. Let me explain. For those of you out there who haven’t read Vonnegut or this book in particular, you should know that Vonnegut’s writing is rarely linear, in that it doesn’t travel from point A to point B with things happening to its main characters in between; instead, it travels from point Q to point R to point B to point A and back to Q again with characters stepping over the lines frequently to ask you questions and gesticulate wildly about some idea or other before returning abruptly, but somehow smoothly, to point W. And while you might expect this to be confusing and hard to follow, it’s a testament to Vonnegut’s supreme literary mastery that is never is. In Slaughterhouse Five, the plot is as tangled as this description because its main character, Billy Pilgrim is, as the quote goes, “unstuck in time”. His life exists as a series of moments—he travels through his own past, present, and future, all randomly, always unexpected. So he never knows where or when in his life he’s going to be, or for how long. To make matters more confusing (but remember it’s not confusing for us, the readers, just for poor Pilgrim) one chapter of his life is spent on a distant planet, Tralfamadore, where its inhabitants live simultaneously throughout time in its entirety. They see and experience every moment all at the same time. But I’m not doing the book any justice here because I am no Vonnegut, nor will I ever be.

Slaughterhouse Five is an exceptional piece of English literature because its thought-provoking anti-war themes are woven so neatly into such a strange science-fiction story. Remember, this was published in the 1960s and sure, there had been plenty of great anti-war literature before this novel came along, but nothing quite like it in terms of its approach to the subject. And there’s been nothing quite like it since.

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