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Thursday, July 11, 2024
Book Review: Land of the Blind
Land of the Blind by Andy Owen Genre: Literary Fiction / War ISBN: 9781611794342 Print Length: 200 pages Publisher: Fireship Press Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski "War zones are places of human extremes," and for And…
"War zones are places of human extremes," and for Andy Owens's unnamed narrator in the moving novel Land of the Blind, they also forever change those who make it out.
Afghanistan 2007. Owens's protagonist, a Royal Marine captain, and his small team attached to the Afghan National Security Directive, make a visit to an Afghan National Army checkpoint along the road linking Kandahar with the capital of Helmand Province. What happens to his close friend and fellow soldier, Jim, forms the nucleus of Owens's story about grief, revenge, and remorse.
A story brilliantly structured around fragments of his protagonist's experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s, Land of the Blind is so persuasive in its authenticity that one forgets it is fiction. In some ways, Owen's collection of memory fragments—from his joining the military in 2004, his military intelligence experiences in Iraq, and his Woolfian "moments of being" in battle—is reminiscent of another stellar "fictional" collection of war stories, All the Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
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