posted
Ok, it isn't OSC, but I still think the characters are believable. William has an aversion to war, but getting drafted left little choice in the matter. He asks the questions I'm sure many soldiers have asked, "why don't we try and talk to them?"
The interaction between characters does imply a society that is less inhibited by a moral code. But I'll touch more on that in one of the other threads.
posted
I found the characters to be believable, but underused it a way, and maybe that part wasn't played up enough. Supposedly it was all these smart people that got drafted, then they are digging holes. Ok, so maybe they had to be smart to remember not to fall backwards in their suits... at least Mandella gets to solve some problems requiring his brain (like when they are building the bunker and have to get the one soldier switched from his suit to another).
Part of the underdevelopment may be from how quickly things move. It is a very active story. And it is supposed to be - things move quickly around Mandella, even time (!) so we don't get as much time as we'd like to know him and the others. Of coure, this may be on purpose.
I'm not saying the characters are not developed - I felt I understood them, and their actions fit who they were. I like that Mandella cares about people - that shines through very well (he was helping Marygay before their permanent relationship was established, like when she got hurt the first time in the tank), and makes him easy to empathize with.
I was surprised that they got back to Earth while their families were still around - that was very unexpected from the book blurb, and what I know of time dilation. I thought all their relatives would be dead by the time they got back, given how long they were away, and how far away they were. Having families available to also provide character development was very useful, and of course having them all die off made it easier to get Mandella and Potter back in space.
The bit on the moon, where they get transferred quickly, seemed off to me. Yeah, I understand the military deciding it can make these changes once you've signed on the dotted line (another Vietnam reaction I believe), so Haldeman did it quick, like ripping off a band-aid. All the promises are broken, and besides, it would be boring to have them sit on their behinds doing training on Luna.
However,
I would like to have seen them fight it a little, or have them give more reasons to not fight it. Mandella's brother was there - was he involved, or should he have fought to keep them? It is ok that they get sent out, but I felt I need a little more their on their motivation to give up so quickly.
I was also surprised at the ease with which Mandella and Potter accepted being separated after recuperating from their amputations. I would have liked to see a bit more fight there too.
I know the book goes quickly, but I wouldn't have minded a few more paragraphs!!
I think the characters were okay. Mandella's drawn well and it's very easy to sympathize with him from start to finish. I liked Marygay Potter and loved how Haldeman used the change of names (from last name to first) to illustrate the change in relationship. My favorite character though is Sergeant Cortez.
However, a lot of the relationships felt hollow to me. People die, but I didn't feel anything from it, nor did I get the impression that Mandella cared as much as he supposedly did, except about Marygay and Singer. When the first person died, I just couldn't get into the emotion of the moment.
Now, if he'd killed off a character he'd previously introduced and that I'd come to like, then, yes, I would have probably been in tears.
Finally, on whether or not Mandella and Potter should have fought to stay together:
I've got some relatives in the military and one of them faced a somewhat similar situation. He was in the Marines, she was in the Navy. They did all they could to stay together, but since they had both joined before they got married, they were resigned to the fact that they could very likely get separated. It was just a fact of life to them and if they ended up serving in different areas, they wouldn't have fought it. They would have complained privately, but they still would have packed their bags and said good-bye without a whimper.
That resignation seems to be true of most of the people I've known who served in the military.
posted
The military, any military, has this little concept of ownership that never goes away. While in the military they can, and sometimes do, just about anything they want. Now if they had a minimum time period for being stationed there, then they would have had somethign to fight about. Not having that, they got what they were prommised - assignment to the moon. Since there was no time period specified, the provisions were met the moment the orders were cut to go there. In all honesty, they could have shipped them directly to without a stop at the moon, as long as they had thier orders to go to the moon.
I guess having been in the military makes some things very easy to believe.
posted
The characters not being fully developed as such made the story more believable for me. The same goes for the plot, which skipped along at a fast pace and was also never actually developed in any great depth. This lack of real development made it seem more like it was a story Mandella was telling after the events to my face and in his own words rather than sitting down and writing out his experiances as a book. It was as if I had approached him in a bar somewhere, bought him a drink and said, 'So, Mandella, tell me about your role in the Forever War,' and he had. I felt he told us enough to know what the characters and the situation was like without leaving us bogged down in superfluous detail. Anything he missed I filled in in my own mind to suit the situation.
Posts: 156 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
Wow. I hadn't looked at the characters that way.
I think the problem is that I'm not a guy. When my husband reads my "guy dialogue" he laughs and asks if I'm trying to make the men sound effeminate. At first that confused me, but now I know that I just need to cut out words. Lots of words. And add grunting where appropriate.
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