The Middle Parts of Fortune
The edition of Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune that I found on the Intertubes was the Filiquarian Publishing version, a cheaply done POD, with no copyright information or explanatory material. You'd do better to find a proper copy of it, which probably means buying it used, or downloading it.
That said, it's a fine fictionalized memoir of fighting in the trenches in WWI. This is considered a classic of Australian literature, even though Manning left Australia at 21 (having already spent a couple of years in England) and never lived there again.
The protagonist, Bourne, is an older, well-off private, who has had some trouble fitting in with the younger, lower-class soldiers in his unit. One of the threads of the story is that the higher-ups have decided to put him in for a commission, so there is the tension connected with leaving the unit and the men to become one of the bosses.
The reason this is probably less well-known today than Good-bye to All That, and All Quiet on the Western Front is that the language is often too poetic and too obscure for the average reader. The reason it was not well-known when first published (except in exclusive literary circles) was that he used the actual language of the men in the dialog, and that was frowned on as non-heroic and disrespectful.
I'm going to put this on my list of Essential Works of WWI.
CBsIP: A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver
The Novels of Park Jiwon, Emanuel Pastreich, trans.
Matter, Iain M. Banks
Orange Fire, Judith R. Robinson
That said, it's a fine fictionalized memoir of fighting in the trenches in WWI. This is considered a classic of Australian literature, even though Manning left Australia at 21 (having already spent a couple of years in England) and never lived there again.
The protagonist, Bourne, is an older, well-off private, who has had some trouble fitting in with the younger, lower-class soldiers in his unit. One of the threads of the story is that the higher-ups have decided to put him in for a commission, so there is the tension connected with leaving the unit and the men to become one of the bosses.
The reason this is probably less well-known today than Good-bye to All That, and All Quiet on the Western Front is that the language is often too poetic and too obscure for the average reader. The reason it was not well-known when first published (except in exclusive literary circles) was that he used the actual language of the men in the dialog, and that was frowned on as non-heroic and disrespectful.
I'm going to put this on my list of Essential Works of WWI.
CBsIP: A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver
The Novels of Park Jiwon, Emanuel Pastreich, trans.
Matter, Iain M. Banks
Orange Fire, Judith R. Robinson