Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Knowing your subject is not enough.
If you didn't already know Steven Pressfield was an expert in ancient warfare, just one of his many lengthy explanations of the inner workings of Alexander the Great's Macedonian army in The Afghan Campaign would be enough to convince you. Part military thesis, part ancient world travel guide ("Artacoana is famous for its shoe factories"), Afghan is one of those books that seems to exist solely so the author can publish his research.
To be fair, Pressfield's scholarly skills are part and parcel of his impressive talent for re-creating the visceral, scalp-carving, lance-in-back horror of ancient battle. But a novel requires more than war; it requires believable, flesh-and-blood soldiers. And creating characters is not Pressfield's forte.
Written in the same spare, direct style as The Virtues of War, his previous Alexander novel, Afghan follows Alexander's three-year campaign to subdue Afghanistan. The story is told through the eyes of a young recruit who could have been recruited by Hollywood Central Casting: the soon-to-be-grizzled innocent being mentored by the already grizzled veteran. He and his mates even talk like slang-happy American movie soldiers, referring to themselves as "Macks" and the Afghan enemy as "Baz."
There's a reason the soldiers speak like us. Pressfield is using Alexander's conflict to comment on our own involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, an effort that ignores 2,000 years of social, religious and cultural change on all sides.
Cold and clunky, Afghan expends too much energy trying to filter the ancient world through a modern lens. That's not a campaign worth waging, let alone winning.
The Afghan Campaign
By Steven Pressfield
Doubleday, 354 pp., $24.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
