The Fearless Man - Softcover

Pfarrer, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224074547 ISBN 13: 9780224074544

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2004

Synopsis

On its publication in 1982 James Carroll called Donald Pfarrer's Neverlight 'the most intelligent and moving novel that I have read about Vietnam'. Paul Fussell wrote that it was 'one of the finest novels "about war" I've ever read, and that includes A Farewell to Arms'. Now, more than twenty years later, Pfarrer revisits the conflict and creates a modern classic - an epic war novel that bears comparison with Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. Captain MacHugh Clare is a seasoned soldier. His men respect him above all others. His mission is to lead his company into the mountains and destroy a hidden cache of the enemy's weapons. This incursion stirs up a deadly resistance. With Mac is Paul Adrano, a Catholic chaplain who has volunteered to serve in combat to test his faith - and test it he does. Adrano also slowly realizes that his vow of celibacy is incompatible with his feelings for Rebecca Vanburen, a Navy nurse treating wounded marines at Da Nang. As Mac's company struggles with the North Vietnamese, The Fearless Man also tells of the struggle of Sarah Clare back home, of her awakening to the new opportunities opening for women in the late sixties. The Fearless Man gives the reade

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

On its publication in 1982, James Carroll called Donald Pfarrer's Neverlight "the most intelligent and moving novel that I have read about Vietnam." Paul Fussell wrote that it was "one of the finest novels about war I've ever read, and that includes A Farewell to Arms." Now Pfarrer revisits the conflict and creates a modern classic–an epic novel of all the wars we wage to occupy ground, forge a future, and save our own souls.
The mission is Vietnam in microcosm: a quest to find and obliterate a secret enemy weapons cache. Leading this fateful journey is Captain MacHugh Clare, a draftee who has become the consummate soldier. Unconcerned with death, he shifts immediately each morning from unconsciousness to action, "from sound sleep to a crashing heart." His reward at the end of the mission is the possibility of seeing his beloved wife. But for now, he cannot stop fighting long enough to see any other world but war.
Beside Mac is his opposite, Chaplain Paul Adrano, who knows only doubt and disillusion. He has come to Vietnam to kill his fear, to find his faith on the field of battle, and he will soon know the forbidden power of violence and the pull of sexual temptation.
Meanwhile, in America, Mac's wife, Sarah, fights her own battle–against a feeling of uselessness, a suspicion that she is "not fit for anything the world needs." Struggling with notions of a woman's proper role, Sarah begins to see possibilities beyond merely waiting at home for the man she loves.
They all complete their missions in ways they had never anticipated.
From a jungle battlefield to the Citadel of Hue to the homefront, Donald Pfarrer paints in prose both violent and lyrical his characters' attempts to believe and deny, commit and be released, search and destroy. Not since Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead has a writer so powerfully explored the inner lives of men and women in war. The Fearless Man is a major work of fiction–one as meaningful, wild, tortured, and unsettling as the Vietnam experience itself.

About the Author:

Donald Pfarrer is the author of Cold River, Neverlight, and Temple and Shipman. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0224074547
• ISBN 13: 9780224074544
• Binding: Paperback