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Bomber (1970)

par Len Deighton

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6982132,499 (4.05)24
The classic novel of the Second World War that relates in devastating detail the 24-hour story of an allied bombing raid. Bomber is a novel of war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die. Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground, in Britain and in Germany. In its documentary style, it is unique. In its emotional power it is overwhelming. Len Deighton has been equally acclaimed as a novelist and as an historian. In Bomber he has combined both talents to produce a masterpiece.… (plus d'informations)
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Affichage de 1-5 de 21 (suivant | tout afficher)
An exceptional book. The amount of research that went into it is amazing. Really brings the war to life. I appreciated the intro by Malcolm Gladwell and his quote from my favorite, Vera Brittain. This is truly a great anti war novel. So very many ways to die. I really got to know the characters and their machines. There was no one lost without remorse. Genius to tell the tale in just 24 hours and from the point of view of both sides of the conflict. I highly recommend. I was glad to have the audio edition so masterfully narrated by Richard Burnip. ( )
  njcur | Feb 7, 2024 |
A few months ago, I was inspired by an article about the novels of Len Deighton to seek out some of his books. My goal was to pick up a secondhand copy of one of his Harry Palmer novels, but when I searched for them in my nearby used bookstore I found none on offer. Among his books they did have, though, was his novel about a Bomber Command raid on a German town. As it was among the novels praised by the author of the article I decided to give a try.

At first, I wasn’t impressed. Deighton takes his time building up to the main event, spending a little over half of the book recounting a day in the lives of both the British aircrews and the Germans who would be involved in the attack. Yet this proves important to his goal, as doing so invests the reader emotionally in his subjects. There are no outright heroes or villains in his book, just flawed people caught up in the war around them. Though they know that the prospects for death loom over them, Deighton shows how they endeavor to get on with their lives and work towards futures that could be taken from them at any moment.

Having then built up a range of characters in the first half of the book, Deighton then spends the rest of it on the raid and its aftermath. It’s an incredibly detailed account that reflects a considerable amount of research, yet Deighton never lets the details of Lancaster design or German air defense operations overwhelm the text. His focus remains resolutely on his characters, as we see the people with whom we’ve become familiar interact with each other as strangers. Known to us, their actions impact each other anonymously, showing how war could be both personal and impersonal at the same time.

That Deighton has invested thought in developing his characters is reflected at the end of the book, in which he provides brief summaries of the subsequent fates of the survivors of the attack. It’s a coda that serves as further evidence of how much effort he put into this fine work, which serves as a powerful commentary on the horrors of war. Because for all of Deighton’s obvious admiration for the boys who flew for Bomber Command, it’s the tragedies of their mission that stand out most dramatically after the last page. ( )
  MacDad | Feb 5, 2022 |
After reading the war propaganda book [b:Bombs Away|486666|Bombs Away|John Steinbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1211316827l/486666._SX50_.jpg|539117] by [a:John Steinbeck|585|John Steinbeck|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1182118389p2/585.jpg] I was deeply disappointed. Instead of being a realistic story about the life on a bomber during WW2, it was a book written for the American military. The purpose was not to describe anything real but to make it easier for the US Air Force to recruit people willing to perform the allied terror bombings.

Immediately afterwards I was determined to find a better, more realistic book, but it is not a topic that attracts good authors. There is probably a mix of shame and the feeling everything is just too random to make a story seem meaningful. Or it's just a depressing topic.

One exception is this book, by Len Deighton, one of the major thriller writers of the second half of the 1900s. This is not a thriller, but, as he describes it, a story about how the war machine chews up people and throws out bodies. Paraphrased.

The book takes place in a time frame of 24 hours in the summer of 1943 when 600 British bombers go for Krefeld in the Ruhr. Deighton tries to cover a lot of different people and different places. There are British bomber crews, parents to bomber crews, ground crew. German villagers and pilots and radar operators. Really too many people, but it was his choice.

Deighton describes people in love, people hating each other, people that are experts at what they do and people that are novices or just incompetent. The common factor is that they all clash in the skies over western Europe, or on the ground of western Europe if you are on the wrong side of explosives.

It is clear that, opposite of Steinbeck, Deighton tries to convey that war sucks, and nothing sucks more than the randomness of area bombing. People live or die based more on luck than anything else and very little is accomplished.

The book is not a great literary piece but it's a valuable counter point to the war propaganda. And a reminder that there are few good guys in a war. It is also, intentionally or accidentally, rather mean against British upper class officers. In the foreword Deighton says it didn't come out as he intended and he regrets that he created a fault line between the NCOs and the officers. Maybe because it's distracting. Maybe because it's misleading.

If anything, I would have liked to see more of those who were missed by lady "fortune". Those that from luck came through unscathed. Now the book mostly focuses on everything that went badly for people.

As a historical tidbit, Len Deighton claims this is the first novel written at a certain IBM machine. Since this was published in 1971, word processors was not something anyone had, so maybe he is right. ( )
  bratell | Dec 25, 2020 |
This was one of those books that were popular when I was a young man. I always assumed that it was another of those Day of The Jackal type of action novels. So I was surprised to read it and discover that it was nothing like that at all.

It is about 24 hours in the life of an airbase that runs bombing raids over Germany at the end of WW2. It has all the undercurrents of class that you’d expect with a group of men conscripted into service. I remember reading once that conscription was the last time that classes mixed in England. However, class is a sub-plot to this book. It deals with the simple horrors of the mass bombings that took place over Germany at the end of the war.

It details the methods used to create the most destruction and loss of life amongst the civilian targets, there is little pretense about military targets. I think the thing that astounded me the most was to learn that while the first bombers were dropping their load over the target others were still queueing to take off back in East Anglia, mission of 1500 planes were not uncommon. ( )
  Ken-Me-Old-Mate | Sep 24, 2020 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 21 (suivant | tout afficher)
Bomber was the clearest proof that Deighton possessed an unmatched gift for analysing complex systems. How the RAF went about the sad business of burning Germany by night, and how the Germans tried to stop them doing it, formed an elaborate, interlocking, technology-intensive closed system which nobody before Deighton had ever succeeded in bringing back to life. The sinister poetic force of the original events had not been captured by the official historians, while the full facts were either abridged or distorted in the pop memoirs. Deighton got everything in. I can remember reading the book in a single night, marvelling at the intensity of detail. He even knew what colour flashes the bombs made when they went off. (Like most members of the generation growing up after the war, I had always assumed — because of news reels — that the bombs had exploded in black and white.)

The weakness of Bomber lay in its characters. Deighton invented a representative battle and staffed it with what he fancied were representative types. Actually they weren’t as clumsily drawn as you might think. Deighton is not quite as bad at character as the critics say, just as John le Carré is not quite as good. A book like Yesterday’s Spy, one of Deighton’s recent fictions, is not only stronger on action than le Carré’s later work, but features more believable people. The cast-list of Close-Up is indeed hopelessly makeshift, but the characters flying around in Bomber, though divided up and labelled in what looks like a rough-and-ready way, are deployed with some cunning to bring out the relevant tensions. You could be excused, however, for not connecting them to the real world.
ajouté par SnootyBaronet | modifierNew Statesman, Clive James
 
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Ritual: A system of religious or magical ceremonies or procedures frequently with special forms of words or a special (and secret) vocabulary, and usually associated with important occasions or actions.
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Between February 1965 and July 31st, 1968, the American bombing missions in Vietnam numbered 107,700. The tonnage of bombs and rockets totalled 2,581,876.
Keisinger’s Continuous Archives The attitude of the gallant Six Hundred which so aroused Lord Tennyson’s admiration arose from the fact that the least disposition to ask the reason why was discouraged by tricing the would-be inquirer to the triangle and flogging him into insensibility.
F. J. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Mitre Press, 1968)
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It was a bomber's sky: dry air, wind enough to clear the smoke, cloud broken enough to recognize a few stars.
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Bomber was the first fiction book written using what is now called a ‘word processor’.
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The classic novel of the Second World War that relates in devastating detail the 24-hour story of an allied bombing raid. Bomber is a novel of war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die. Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground, in Britain and in Germany. In its documentary style, it is unique. In its emotional power it is overwhelming. Len Deighton has been equally acclaimed as a novelist and as an historian. In Bomber he has combined both talents to produce a masterpiece.

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