It might seem a long stretch from The Odyssey to the First World War but it really isn't... When Bob Dylan put together his Nobel laureate's lecture a few years ago, he cited three works of literature that had had a profound influence on his songwriting.
They were The Odyssey, Moby-Dick and All Quiet On The Western Front. I'd read and marvelled at the first two of these but had only dipped into the third in my school's library many years ago.
So I have just caught up by reading Erich Maria Remarque's classic account of life and gruesome death in the trenches of 1914-18 – which tells just about everything there is to know about the futility and obscenity of war.
But that was just a beginning. Remarque's sequel, The Way Back, is less well known but no less stunning, as it recounts what it was like for surviving – and traumatised – soldiers to return home to a world that could never understand what they had experienced.
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And the last part of a Remarque trilogy (for me) has been his unfinished but still tremendously compendious The Promised Land – a story of German immigrants escaping the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe to begin a precarious existence in the US in 1944.
All three books stand as a testament to a great and thrilling writer who seems never to shy away from the truth – whether it be about the horrors of war, the stresses of life turned upside down or the hard facts of human relationships (in The Promised Land he includes a description of sex which I would guess is unequalled anywhere for its complete and unsparing honesty).
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