Review: Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow
From the inside jacket cover of ORDINARY HEROES by Scott Turow:Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiance and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to talk about his war.
As he pieces together his father's past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how Dubin, a JAG lawyer attached to Patton's Third Army and desperate for combat experience, got more than he bargained for when he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin, a wayward OSS officer who, despite his spectacular bravery with the French Resistance, appeared to be acting on orders other than his commanders'.
In pursuit of Martin, Dubin and his sergeant are parachuted into Bastogne just as the Battle of the Bulge reaches its apex. Pressed into the leadership of a desperately depleted rifle company, the men are forced to abandon their quest for Martin and his fiery, maddeningly elusive comrade, Gita, as they fight for their lives through carnage and chaos the likes of which Dubin could never have imagined. In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.
Loosely based on his father's WWII stories, Turow's seventh novel does not hold writing as tense as in his courtroom thrillers with the last minute surprises. That didn't bother me too much, though, because I like that Turow took his tale out of the present and far from any courtroom. And there are a couple of big surprises.
I'm not a war-story buff and, frankly, I know very little about WWII. I learned a lot about what it's like to be in a battle--quite graphically--but his main character, Stewart, isn't very heroic--which is the point, I suppose. But reading about the exploits of a JAG officer tracking down a suspected spy should have some heroic stuff happening. And it just seemed too...ordinary.
What I really liked about the book, though, was how Turow exposed the ambiguities of the moral issues at work: leveling of all pretentious chest-pounding over the necessity of war, while accepting no alternative. Turow allows the reader to vacillate between points of view, which gives his characters and the story some connection to reality, since most of us often sit on the fence about important principles before falling to one side or the other.
The love story angle in the book is important to its continuity and propels the story beyond just being about a greenhorn in France dodging bullets and reckless naiveté. And it's partially what kept me reading.
So. How did Ordinary Heroes rate on the Eubanks' Triple-E Meter (1-5; 5 being best):
Entertaining: 3.01
Enlightening: 3.14
Educating: 4.00
You can buy the book on Amazon.com in hardback for $19.00; paperback (with a different cover) for $7.99; or a Kindle Edition for $7.19. Published in 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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