Field Glass
by Joanna Howard and Joanna Ruocco
2017
Field Glass is a very strange, unsettling novella. It is told in the first person by an unnamed primary narrator - a soldier sheltering among civilians in a country estate that is near the front line of a war in the deep of winter. It successfully achieves the effect that I think both Kathryn Davis's Silk Road and Jeff Vandermeer's Dead Astronauts were aiming for but, in my opinion, missed.
The narrator is writing (or dictating?) messages to a love back home. Intermixed are much shorter dispatches by other soldiers, identified only by serial number and blood type. There is no plot really. The style is almost all description, no exposition. All sensation, no explanation. It's a style that I hardly have the vocabulary to describe, except to say that it feels very distant, the opposite of books that try to make you feel close to the characters or to imaginatively identify yourself with them.
We don't know where we are, or when, or what war is being fought, or what sides there might be, or which side the narrator is on. Just that it is cold, the landscape is ruined, most of the other soldiers are dead, and the narrator is trapped by an enclosing siege. I imagine a place something like the great house from Downton Abbey, and all the talk of prosthetics and artificial blood makes me think of either an alternate WWI or perhaps a not too-distant future.
The pleasure of reading this one comes from enjoying the use of language, which I'm tempted to call prose poetry. There's no rhyme or meter, but the sentences are dense with meaning, and the word choice is unusual enough that you have to read slowly and carefully to take it in. It's only 96 pages, but it feels like a complete experience, even though nothing is answered or resolved.
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