The Battle Within by Alastair Luft
2017, Inkshares, 350 pages, $23.95
Fiction. Military Stories
This is very much a character driven story. It revolves around the protagonist, Hugh Dégaré, a Major in the Canadian Forces stationed in downtown Ottawa. He’s been on several tours, and suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Over the course of the book, his suffering becomes worse and worse, eventually costing him his job, friends, wife, and more.
This was very much a political book, in the sense that it describes a problem that requires a public policy solution rather than about political parties, wherein the author wants the audience to understand that the military is not doing a good enough job looking after veterans, and more should be done to assist those that suffer from mental health problems, during and after service.
The portrayal of Hugh is very realistic as someone suffering from PTSD. He alienates his friends, family and other supports. He makes bad decisions that the reader can see coming a mile away. As a reader, it’s hard to be sympathetic to this character because he rejects the aid that he needs when it’s offered to him, but that’s a very realistic course of action for someone battling depression. It's a tough decision for the author to follow a character that alienates himself even from the reader. Hugh is not a good person, though he might have been at one time. His existing relationships are from a long past, and his modern relationships are all soured from his condition.
Casting such a currently dislikable character, though I’m sure he was plenty likeable in years past, as the main spotlight in an interesting decision. Hurt people hurt people, and people who are suffering are hard to be around, making it hard for them to get help.
I didn’t like this story because the main character was so difficult. I understand why he needs to be so difficult, but that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed the trip. Still, I found myself thinking about the character, or more precisely his situation, after I was done.
I didn’t read this book, I listened to it as an audiobook, and I have to say that the narration of Jesse Einstein really didn’t help the difficult characters. His voice inflection was either “rugged and manly” or “meek and mild”, and nothing in between. This made the story seem like a childish, incel approach to masculinity that I had to tune out. That’s an inherent problem with audiobooks, you have to sometimes separate the voice from the words, and in this case it was a problem.
I’m giving it a rating of three stars out of five, it was good but not great; an author’s first book. I was legitimately surprised by the ending, though it was clearly foreshadowed. It gave a good insight into an issue, and I like political novels. But for me, the negatives of the dislikeable main character, the flat side-characters, and the bad audiobook narration brought it down from four stars. I also appreciated that despite being a military story, the author didn’t alienate the reader with an excessive use of acronyms, abbreviations, lingo, and gun talk.
★★★☆☆
