Book Review: Rules for Old Men Waiting

Title: Rules for Old Men Waiting
Author: Peter Pouncey
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Finished Reading: January 11th
Own: No - borrowed from a friend
Why Chosen: Recommended by said friend!

This book came highly recommended to me this summer by two friends - Amy and Sondie. It is the life story of the fictional Scotoland born World War I historian Robert MacIver. We learn of his glory days as a Rugby player for Scotland, his service in World War II, his life with artist wife Margaret, his academic career in the States, the death of his son David in Vietnam, and finally his last days as he waits for death to join him with Margaret and David. Academic and althelete, Robert is a very interesting character.

But, the most interesting twist is how Pouncey intertwined a story MacIver decided to write as he spent his last days in a wintry cabin. It is the story of three men entrenched in WWI battlefields...a story of the good and evil of individual men in the setting of war.

I gave it a lower rating (3 out of 5 stars), I think, due to the disjointed way I read the book, not necessarily because of the book itself. I picked it up and put it down several times, reading other books in between. The book's flow itself is disjointed by design, and my reading of it made it much more difficult to follow.

Here are some passages I especially liked:

He was not well equipped to pursue this line of thought, but the effect these pictures had was to screw him more tightly into his loneliness.

He could drag his finger through the crusty ice on the inside of windowpanes in any room now. Lying in bed at night, often in his navy greatcoat, he could hear the old house groaning around him, shrinking in on itself under the onslaught. They were both just lying there waiting. Both of them old and cold. margaret gone. Everything inside and everything outside fronzen in its aches and pains to a tight immobility. One bold move and something would snap.

The real debasing role of depression is to revove all flashes of energy or concentration, to ensure tha tyou can never complete anything. Depression as depth fatigue. It takes a particular zest in grinding you to immobility, so that you have no smidgeon of self-esteem left. It's my kind of guy - no half measures, takes no prinsoners.

He did not intend to write another line, but he could still take an interst in the characters he had created; there was some pleasure in projecting their lives further out, or going forwards and backwards over them, as memory does with our own, or pondering their contradictions.