Western Books and Writers

The Reluctant Witness in Matthew Eck’s “The Farther Shore”

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 12-05-07

	from Milkweed Press

For a culture that lives in fear of bomb-ticking shoes and the color orange, we know little of the modern war zone’s isolating panic. It is this experience of war that Matthew Eck disrobes in his new novel, The Farther Shore, the 2007 National Fiction Award winner from Milkweed Press. The slim book (a mere 173 pages) is epic by veracity rather than length, and it translates Eck’s experience as an Army soldier in 1992 in Somalia and Haiti into the story of a small unit of soldiers who are separated from their command and must find their way out of a hostile and nameless city.

Through narrator Joshua Stantz, a Midwestern boy who enlisted for the college tuition money, we learn that this is a city where people are shot in the streets, battles go wrong, soldiers are left behind and to escape, Stantz says, “you paid with whatever you had. And sometimes you paid with whatever could be taken away.” Having consumed the fear and war around him, even his body maps the effects of war as he can no longer digest food or water.  It is in this state, wandering from place to place in a city for “desolate and abandoned children,” that Stantz becomes a reliable albeit reluctant witness.

This characterization of a soldier reveals much of what Eck himself experienced as a soldier. In an interview this week, Eck explained that, “the hardest part about war is that all you want to do is forget it.” Instead, Eck devoted eight years to writing about his experience in order to turn it into something he could, “visit upon a character so he would experience it.”

And so, Eck adeptly and unabashedly places Stantz in a thicket of surreal events. While the details of this journey are clear and engaging, what is also of note is how little Stantz actually tells us. Although we can imagine we are in Mogadishu in the 1990s, Stantz never names his location, and the ambiguity has both a startling affect and a settling one. Through details we become comfortable and awake to our surroundings and yet the bombs go off, and we are dislocated again, realizing we don’t know where we are and we don’t know how we are going to get out.

When asked about this choice to withhold location, Eck responded, “As a soldier you are in such a distant place from anywhere you have been as an American. Every soldier’s experience is so surreal that you know you are located in a place but you really never know where you are.”

Stantz views his dislocation without judgment: there are no evil-doers and no heroes here. There are only the guys who are trying to get out. Without this sort of judgment, Stantz’s emotions also seem disabled and he is unwilling to pull deeper meaning from his experience. Often, it feels as if retelling the story has come a bit too soon for him. But even this disjunction seems fitting as Stantz tells his story from the raw vantage point of a soldier who is just back from war and continues to disconnect from the experience. As Eck said, “During war you disassociate yourself from the moment and move on and learn to forget about it.” That disconnection continues to happen, even after the war is over. Recently, Eck spoke with a combat buddy over the phone. “I was telling a story about someone else, and the night he was out on guard duty. He walked out of the bunker and three mortars landed in front of him. After a long pause my friend said, ‘Matthew, that was you.’ And then I remembered it almost immediately.”

In a similar way, Eck used Stantz to relay his own experiences. In doing so, he found a way to digest the experience. “By the end of writing the book,” he said, “I felt like I owned that experience. I felt like that was the war I had fought.”

Through this stark book, Eck gives readers a way to see what is happening on the ground through the eyes of those who are actually there. This is a rare view defined by details, fear, death and an intimate longing to go home and forget. And while Eck carefully locates this experience, he is just as careful not to dictate the meaning of events that remain beyond comprehension.  Instead, he simply haunts us with the indelible images of people in war.

Eck will read from The Farther Shore Wednesday, December 5 at 7:00 at Shakespeare and Co.

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