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Peace

By Jennie Camp, Special to the Rocky

Published April 24, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Fiction. By Richard Bausch. Knopf, $19.95. Grade: B-

Plot in a nutshell: Robert Marson, Saul Asch and Benny Joyner are somewhere in the mountains of Italy, ordered to keep pushing blindly north in search of retreating Germans in the closing days of World War II. The three American soldiers are on foot patrol, expected to move forward until fired on and then turn back to report the enemy's positions. The rain has started four days before we join them, and Marson, Asch and Joyner are following an elderly Italian scout whose loyalties are unclear.

They bicker as they march, revisiting again and again a fearful scene in which a German soldier and his girlfriend were shot. As Asch says: "I got enough bad imagery in my head to last two lifetimes. I don't know how I'm gonna get rid of it all."

Sample of prose: Here Marson has slung Asch over his back, trying to get the injured man to safety while a sniper lurks somewhere in the woods beyond: "Marson carried him, stumbling in the heavy snow, toward the protection of the ledge, beyond the hillock of driven snow with their frantic tracks all over it. The knowledge that he would not hear the shot until it hit him made him groan and push through, panic climbing in him, the sound of the snow breaking at his feet too loud, everything pounding, everything shouting with the not-sound of the bullet he felt coming at him."

Pros: Bausch's prose is sparse and careful, helping to escalate the tensions that drive the novel quickly forward as the men march blindly into the rain. The three men have witnessed death already, and their fear of the unknown is intense and believable.

Cons: Although the days depicted are real and horrifyingly engaging, the tensions in the novel reveal little that's surprisingly new about the human condition. For example, in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the tale of a group of soldiers marching through the murky jungles of Vietnam, O'Brien's literary approach to the horrors of war makes even such age-old violence seem startlingly new. While smoothly written and readable, Bausch's novel doesn't succeed in breaking new literary ground.

Final word: Peace is an engaging, one-sitting read that reminds us of the violence of war, yet does little to forward its own genre.