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A review by jeremyanderberg
The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead
4.0
I've read two other Robert Olmstead novels, both during my Westerns project last year. The Savage Country was about a buffalo hunt, and Far Bright Star was about a small military outfit on the hunt for Pancho Villa. Both were good, but also desolate and violent. While Olmstead tends to write in the Western genre, this one is half love story and half Korean War story.
Henry Childs is just 17 when he falls in love with well-to-do Mercy. The intensity and emotion that Olmstead puts into that young relationship is very moving and remarkably believable. You feel for the characters and root for their story. But then Mercy's dad intervenes, and Henry ends up enlisting with the Marines and is shipped off to the Korean War on the cusp of its most intense battle — the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. (If that sounds familiar, it's because I read On Desperate Ground — the remarkable Korean War history — at the start of the year.)
The battle scenes are intense to say the least. Yes, there's the brutal violence, but also numbing cold, an unforgiving landscape, and relentless exhaustion. One of the most poignant parts of the book for me was actually at the end in an author's note. He related a story about being at an event and a woman asking why his battle scenes were so gruesome. It was a military vet who actually answered, saying something along the lines of "Mam, this was our experience. We need to be able to talk about the reality of what happened, otherwise you're just getting a glossed over version. This is what war is." A powerful point, to say the least.
Though at times hard to read, as books about war often are, The Coldest Night was really good. Olmstead's writing is sometimes poetic, but also Hemingway-esque in its sparseness and short, declarative sentence structure. It's a really interesting mix. His books are undeniably grim, but what I wrote about Far Bright Star remains true here too: There's an odd beauty to be found within the desolation of the story.
Henry Childs is just 17 when he falls in love with well-to-do Mercy. The intensity and emotion that Olmstead puts into that young relationship is very moving and remarkably believable. You feel for the characters and root for their story. But then Mercy's dad intervenes, and Henry ends up enlisting with the Marines and is shipped off to the Korean War on the cusp of its most intense battle — the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. (If that sounds familiar, it's because I read On Desperate Ground — the remarkable Korean War history — at the start of the year.)
The battle scenes are intense to say the least. Yes, there's the brutal violence, but also numbing cold, an unforgiving landscape, and relentless exhaustion. One of the most poignant parts of the book for me was actually at the end in an author's note. He related a story about being at an event and a woman asking why his battle scenes were so gruesome. It was a military vet who actually answered, saying something along the lines of "Mam, this was our experience. We need to be able to talk about the reality of what happened, otherwise you're just getting a glossed over version. This is what war is." A powerful point, to say the least.
Though at times hard to read, as books about war often are, The Coldest Night was really good. Olmstead's writing is sometimes poetic, but also Hemingway-esque in its sparseness and short, declarative sentence structure. It's a really interesting mix. His books are undeniably grim, but what I wrote about Far Bright Star remains true here too: There's an odd beauty to be found within the desolation of the story.