Book 5: Slaughterhouse 5

I’m not really sure what I was expecting when it came to this book. I had no idea what the story was about, other than possibly time travel, but whatever it was, it wasn’t what I got.

The basic gist is: Billy Pilgrim is an American soldier captured by the Germans during World War II and taken to a prison in Dresden. But he is not just in the prison, as he has become unstuck in time and so wanders about his timeline, both on Earth and on the planet Tralfamadore where he has been put on display with a human female for the entertainment of the Tralfamadorians. They have no concept of time as a linear thing, they see everything that has happened and will happen, they cannot change it, and so choose to dwell on the good things, rather than the bad. We also see a little of Billy’s life after the war, his marriage and children, his career and his death.

I haven’t really got much to say about the book to be honest. I didn’t enjoy it and I didn’t hate it. It’s pretty short but it took me a fair while to get through it, mainly because I had no inclination to pick it up and continue. I didn’t care about Billy, I wasn’t all that interested in what was happening, there’s no real urgency to the story because you mostly know what’s going to happen anyway. It’s an easy read in regards to the writing style, though somewhat annoying with the repetition of ‘So it goes’. Wiki tells me it appears one hundred and sixteen times. That’s about one hundred and fifteen times too many.

I think I’ll give up on the so-called ‘classics’ for a while, they’re all so damn heavy-handed and don’t speak to me at all.