The Aardvark Is Ready for War

Rating:
Summary: Not really all that ready
Review: A slightly off kilter book about how the media is the message. Our hero Greg Bender is impossible to like as is all the characters. Their vulgarity has become so integrated in their personalities, that they think they are normal. Sometimes Blinn goes off on his own surveillance mission, trying to define what is real, and if it stays real and truthful after it's processed through the media, and its transmission devices. This occurs every ten pages or so. Of course, in reality, nothing really changes unless the humans who handle the media and its devices intentionally distort the story, creating lies to sell copy. Contrary to Blinn's view it is not the machines that are the culprit, but as always, man. I also find it difficult to believe that an enlisted person, with only a high school education waxing so philosophical, reaching out to Baudrillard, Sartre or Chomsky; trying to "find meaning in the chaos of life," that's just too much. There are a few funny musings, that give you a "ha!." The book was purchased from the extreme discount area of the bookstore.

Rating:
Summary: Modern catch 22 (but no-where near as good)
Review: An intense madness follows throughout this book without the huomour of catch 22.

Rating:
Summary: A Pale Echo of CATCH 22
Review: I suppose a comparison to Joseph Heller's CATCH 22 isn't a completely fair one. CATCH 22 is one of the great novels of the century, a startlingly funny and original story that captures both the insanity of war, and the humanity of people stuck in the middle of it. It is a novel that is as true and relevant now as when it was written. It hasn't aged a day.

That's one of the problems with THE AARDVARK IS READY FOR WAR. It attempts to do for the Gulf War what CATCH 22 did for World War II, and to some extent, it does succeed. AARDVARK does capture the language of warfare in today's age, and it contrasts nicely against the overall shallowness of modern society. The Gulf War was a war fought via MTV and Nintendo, a war that never felt like one, a war with no personal impact for the majority of the North American population.

From this angle, AARDVARK succeeds. Its unnamed protagonist is a true product of the times, a video voyeur who views life as a more personal and intimate experience when experienced through a camera lens.

But this is not a new idea. It is already a cliche' that society's version of intimacy has devolved into a detatched cynicism. Through the overwhelming media intrusion into our lives, we have become numb to the shocks that the world still has in store for us.

By adopting this outlook, AARDVARK unfortunately falls prey to the very trap it condemns. AARDVARK, like its hero, is shallow, only fooling itself into thinking it's deep and meaningful. Unlike CATCH 22, which AARDVARK mirrors in many ways (including major plot points), AARDVARK simply doesn't have anything new to say. It carpets its unoriginality in a new form, and does it well enough. But, similar to the Gulf War itself, once it ends, it's forgotten as soon as you change the channel.

Rating:
Summary: A Pale Echo of CATCH 22
Review: I suppose a comparison to Joseph Heller's CATCH 22 isn't a completely fair one. CATCH 22 is one of the great novels of the century, a startlingly funny and original story that captures both the insanity of war, and the humanity of people stuck in the middle of it. It is a novel that is as true and relevant now as when it was written. It hasn't aged a day.

That's one of the problems with THE AARDVARK IS READY FOR WAR. It attempts to do for the Gulf War what CATCH 22 did for World War II, and to some extent, it does succeed. AARDVARK does capture the language of warfare in today's age, and it contrasts nicely against the overall shallowness of modern society. The Gulf War was a war fought via MTV and Nintendo, a war that never felt like one, a war with no personal impact for the majority of the North American population.

From this angle, AARDVARK succeeds. Its unnamed protagonist is a true product of the times, a video voyeur who views life as a more personal and intimate experience when experienced through a camera lens.

But this is not a new idea. It is already a cliche' that society's version of intimacy has devolved into a detatched cynicism. Through the overwhelming media intrusion into our lives, we have become numb to the shocks that the world still has in store for us.

By adopting this outlook, AARDVARK unfortunately falls prey to the very trap it condemns. AARDVARK, like its hero, is shallow, only fooling itself into thinking it's deep and meaningful. Unlike CATCH 22, which AARDVARK mirrors in many ways (including major plot points), AARDVARK simply doesn't have anything new to say. It carpets its unoriginality in a new form, and does it well enough. But, similar to the Gulf War itself, once it ends, it's forgotten as soon as you change the channel.

Rating:
Summary: A thinking mans view of the war
Review: This book, set on a US aircraft carrier and its various ports of call en route to the Persian Gulf on the verge of the outbreak of the recent shooting war there, delicately describes the spiraling breakdown of- well, of everything. Narrated by a gas-masked (i.e. aardvarked) naval officer, alternately seen through his eyes and through the lens of the video camera he always carries with him, it delineates the descent into barbarism of his fellow-soldiers, contrasting the decay of human and humane relationships with the vast technological edifices which they live in and control (or pretend to control). This is nothing particularly new, but Blinn provides an unusually complex narrator, torn between detachment and compassion, and does an especially good job of motivating the world he shows- decay is not accidental, but is rather a necessary, even vital force. Layers of representation and ambiguity- be they sexual, racial, or, even more fundamentally, of simple identity- ! build throughout the book, showing the reader a world which is eminently entertaining in its absurdity and compellingly disturbing in its instant recognizability as our own.

Rating:
Summary: A latter-day "Catch-22"
Review: Though it is not as good as "Catch-22", this novel sparkles with sassy dialogue, military argot and flashy gadgets, becoming, in the process, an authentic account of the technologised conflict which was the Gulf War. It implies how, in the light of how life today is dominated by digital satellite technology, camcorders and computers, everyone has assumed the role of voyeur. The anonymous narrator is a recruit enlisted to fight in the "hyperral" Gulf War crisis, in which, by virtue of the hi-tech surveillance equipment employed, the perception of a thing becomes a way of "manipulating" it. The book is stuffed with borrowings from such postmodern epigones as Baudrillard, and is far more philosophically complex than one might expect, though redeemed also by its irreverent humour.

Rating:
Summary: A latter-day "Catch-22"
Review: Though it is not as good as "Catch-22", this novel sparkles with sassy dialogue, military argot and flashy gadgets, becoming, in the process, an authentic account of the technologised conflict which was the Gulf War. It implies how, in the light of how life today is dominated by digital satellite technology, camcorders and computers, everyone has assumed the role of voyeur. The anonymous narrator is a recruit enlisted to fight in the "hyperral" Gulf War crisis, in which, by virtue of the hi-tech surveillance equipment employed, the perception of a thing becomes a way of "manipulating" it. The book is stuffed with borrowings from such postmodern epigones as Baudrillard, and is far more philosophically complex than one might expect, though redeemed also by its irreverent humour.