Three Day Road

"Joseph is a friend of mine and l love this book. The other novel that could have been on the list is [Sebastian Faulks’s] Birdsong , which is a beautiful book, but because Sebastian has quite properly got a lot of attention, I thought it would be nice to choose something else. Three Day Road is a very powerful short novel. It’s almost as if the Western Front is seen through the hallucinatory vision of a shaman. It’s a story of two young Cree boys who grew up together in the wilderness of Manitoba and who go off to war in the same spirit that young men everywhere in the Empire responded to the call. They both become extremely good snipers and the book traces their descent, one into madness and the other into morphine addiction. It’s a powerful, beautiful and haunting lens upon that conflict. I don’t think there’s another book that more powerfully describes the loneliness and nightmarish qualities of being a sniper in that war – crawling into no man’s land, basically being a skilled murderer with a licence to kill – and what it does to a man’s soul. I think it’s to be highly recommended. Yes, and one of the protagonists is haunted by the fate of the other and the revelation of that is one of the great climaxes of any novel that I have ever read. But I mustn’t give the ending away. . This war defined Canada – the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge and the Canadian contributions to that war. It was only the suicidal defence of the Canadians in April 1915 at Ypres that kept the Germans from breaking through during the first use of poisonous gas at the Western Front."