Brute force

'For Whom The Bell Tolls' may not have been my first encounter with Ernest Hemingway - I read 'A Farewell To Arms' ages ago, but don't remember it - but it might well be my last.

I can't seem to reflect on the book without arriving at two of the most cliched views about Hemingway's writing. Firstly, that he's a very male author. As a fictional dispatch from the Spanish Civil War, 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' often reads like the work of a man flexing his muscles. It's packed with admittedly vivid scenes of violence and brutality (I'm thinking of Pilar's tale of the mob lynchings, as well as Andres's recollections of his teenage triumphs baiting bulls), and builds in classic style towards a tense climax when central character Robert Jordan's preparations for blowing the bridge come to a head.

Which is fine, except for the unconvincingly weak and crudely fashioned romantic sub-plot in which Jordan becomes emotionally and sexually entwined with Maria, an escapee from a train blown up by the guerrilla band. The reasons or nature of her attraction to him is never explained or explored, except vaguely by the fact that he is a dashing "Ingles", whereas his attraction to her is signalled repeatedly in the text when they first meet by the thickening of his throat. Huh?

Secondly, that though Hemingway's language - economic and functional, the vast majority of adjectives and adverbs deemed superfluous - is suited to the harshness and brutality of the events which it describes, it lacks finesse and ostentatious craftsmanship. Of course, it's a matter of debate whether a book needs to employ a certain type of language in order to be classified as 'great literature', but personally I enjoy novels whose richness of language I can revel in - that in itself can blind me to a multitude of other sins. Lacking any particularly memorable passages - even the paragraphs describing Jordan and Maria's lovemaking, while looser and more fluid in style, are disappointingly hackneyed - 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' struck me as little more than a competent and well-paced Andy McNab style thriller for readers prepared to venture further afield than airport bookshops.

Not entirely without interest, then, but at the same time not a book I'm in any desperate hurry to read again.