I'm interested in any comments you may care to post after reading C.S. Forester's The General. Academia's neglect of Forester is peculiar when novelists far inferior in influence, ability, scope, intellect, subtlty and artistry are given place.
Forester's achievement in The General is to combine readability, character portayal, historiography, lament and caution in artistic balance. Having read the novel, one forever feels that an insight into the Great War has been gained, an opinion created, and an interest piqued.
But, over to you .....
Update: the comments so far are of an astonishing calibre. read for your edification, & by all means add your own (even it pre-empts your essay argument!)
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As many of the course texts have done, The General in particular has lent a lot of life insight into the kind of character we (students in the 21st century) only encounter in frequent cartoons and caricatures. The stereotype becomes an archetype.
In terms of specifically potent characerization, what struck me was the realization that Curzon's patriotism extends so far that he does not consider himself a human being. Thus, to see his colleagues' and underlings' lives as ready commodities for the cause takes on a kind of mad internal logic.
Curzon, he's very understandable, and yet quite odd, quite specific. This takes a lot of literary skill, an eye for real human beings.
I find Parade's End and Vile Bodies accomplish something similar (among their many accomplishments); that is, a very subtle and humanist insight into the often roundly neglected and typecast ways of the upper class.
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