Sent to Greenland by mistake and the crazy time there. ( )

No-one Thinks of Greenland by John Griesemer (2002)

Set on a forgotten Army base in Greenland just a few years after the end of the Korean War, this novel has a lot going for it but just doesn’t manage to deliver. Despite the evocative backdrop, the plot is plodding and slow to develop; I was nearly to the end and still waiting for something to happen. The characters are also not quite all there; the love story that forms the backbone of the plot seems contrived, and all the characters seem to be forced into the actions they take by the author, rather than coming to life naturally. The writing showed a lot of promise, though, and I often wished while reading it that it could have been a better book. I’ll certainly give this author another shot, once his storytelling skills have had time to mature. ( )

In the 1950's a young corporal in the army named Rudy gets mistakenly sent to Greenland, where a secret military hospital houses severely wounded soldiers from the Korean war. They are kept there until they die, then reported suddenly found to their families (who assumed them missing-in-action) with no details disclosed...

Rudy finds himself assigned to create a newspaper for the hospital base, and with it gets special clearance to enter "the Wing" where the wounded are tended. Feeling a journalistic spirit, he starts to unfold stories about the hospital, the soldiers and wounded there, but as he begins to uncover secrets, things start to unravel around him... Not to mention that he finds his superior's aide/girlfriend irresistibly attractive, and the Colonel is a dangerous man to cross. The setting has an unreal, foreboding quality. The violence at the end was shocking, but did not surprise me too much; after all, they called the time of winter "The Stark Raving Dark." Rudy in particular wrestles with his conscience, occasionally does inexplicably crazy things, is awed by the landscape, confused by his own presence there. In this strange and remote place, he begins to find himself in ways he never did back home where everything was easier, and safer.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

An amazing first novel that draws obvious comparisons to Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, but this novel stands on its own merits. Based on the actual existence of a secret military hospital in Greenland during the Korean War, the author takes advantage of the otherworldliness of the arctic landscape to emphasize the loneliness and desolation of men and women stationed far from home. The fact that everyone has to experience six months of darkness ("stark raving dark") after six months of sunshine adds to the character's emotional instability and feelings of temporal dislocation. This is a funny, poignant novel with romance, mystery and the underlying theme of how people deal with their mistakes in life. ( )