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catdad77a45's review
5.0
My impetus for reading this came via an odd, circuitous route - I was listening to the recently shuttered, flop London musical based on the novel, and read that it, in turn, incorporated material from the uncensored, restored version of the book that had only been published a few years previously. I was intrigued that, among many other emendations, a lot of material about gay activities in the peacetime army had been excised. Not really remembering a lot from the award-winning film (or the subsequent TV miniseries of 1979), I decided to give it a try anyway ... and surprisingly, really, REALLY enjoyed reading it. Sure, there are languid passages of philosophical diatribes that seem anachronistically out of place - and stylistically atrocious, crazy-making things, like Jones' eschewing apostrophes, and stringing together 2 or 3 adverbs, willy-nilly. But he makes up for this with a genuinely exciting plot and characters that one really cares about. It is sad few people read Jones nowadays - he was an American original, and this National Book Award winning novel should be rediscovered, especially in this uncensored version, as Jones originally intended it.
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