Slaughterhouse 5
Kurt Vonnegut
Vintage
Slaughterhouse 5 tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a 44 year old optometrist time traveler. On the night his daughter marries Billy abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore, is put on display in their zoo, where he is a great attraction for the locals. So it goes.
A POW in WWII, Billy held in Dresden works as free labour during the day and locked up in the slaughterhouse at night. When Dresden is bombed by the allies, Billy and his inmates survive the assault whilst above them firestorms destroy the city, killing 135,000 people.
My favourite passage is the movie Billy watches documenting ‘The gallant American pilots’. Watching the movie backwards, the bloodied and battered gallant pilots fly backwards. The German bombers help them by sucking the bullets out of their battered American planes. In return the Americans open the big belies of their planes and take back all the bombs they have dropped. The pilots climb out of their planes, the deadly chemicals are shipped back to the factories and buried in the ground where they cannot hurt anyone. So it goes.
Slaughterhouse 5 reads a cross between a science fiction and a meditation on the futility of war. The story of Billy Pilgrim told with wry humour echoes Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. A dark poignant undertone running through the book throws the spotlight on the human cost of war. At times moving, at times nonsensical and times laugh outloud funny, Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the most surprising and original novels I have read on WWII. It is no surprise it has remained a timeless classic for over 4 decades.
Poo-tee-weet. 4stars
