**War and Peace **is pretty good. I’m not talking about “puts you on the edge of your seat!!!” but Tolstoy shows both the big picture and what the individual experiences are like.
There’s a big battle scene towards the end of John Carter that is a complete jumble, at least to me. Helium is attacked by the Zodangans(?), and Carter arrives with ships full of green warriors, who wade right into battle. How they know who to kill, and how the Heliumites know that the green warriors are now their allies (after fighting them since forever) isn’t explained.
That looks interesting, thanks for the rec.
I remembered also reading a rather unorthodox fantasy series I got off a thread here(Dance Of The Stone Chameleon) and there are still big battles and the aftermath of big battles. Clearly the scenes are meant to be horrific, thousands and thousands of mangled corpses, but I found myself going meh because it again is anonymous soldiers. The series is pretty strange and violent to begin with though.
For me Bernard Cornwell, author of the Sharpe series, writes the best battle scenes in the business: he tells you who’s doing what to whom, but also how and why, without getting bogged down in over-researched info dumps to show how much he’s learnt about Portugese infantry weapons of 1804. The result is that you come away with a genuine understanding of history, just how and why battles were won or lost.
I agree… one of my earlier posts had a huge Cornwell digression, but I cut it out.
What I like is that he does historical fiction well- it’s not just a fictional story with a backdrop of historical events, but rather the historical events take a serious role in the book.
So if you’re reading (say) “Harlequin”, the lead-up to the Battle of Caen is as much a part of the story as the actual conduct of the battle itself, which is told from the point of view of a relatively low-ranking archer who happens to be there at the time.
(haven’t read the “Sharpe” books, but have read the Grail Quest, the Warlord Chronicles and the Saxon Tales, so I’m pretty familiar with Cornwell)
It probably isn’t everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, but I really enjoyed the battle scenes in *300 *and its “sequel,” 300: Rise of an Empire. The cinematography was highly stylized with a speeding-up-and-slowing-down time scale and an almost graphic-novel look. Just the newness of it was enough to make it interesting, and the gore and violence and excitement made it even better.
Of course, since those movies were about 75% battle scenes, they *had *to work.
Can’t speak to the sequel, but I’ve always viewed the fight scenes in 300 as being one part battle, two parts dance number. It’s just dancing with a lot of flying gore and so forth. I think it works really well in the context. If you’ve seen Syder’s movie Sucker Punch, you can see just how wrong that can go.
Some of the best battles in fiction I’ve seen are in Game of Thrones. Most of the actual fights are pretty brief, but the books spend a lot of time on the buildup and then on the aftermath. Battles feel important, and none of them seem like foregone conclusions.
One of the biggest complaints about HBO’s Rome was the lack of battle scenes, which they couldn’t afford to show.
The problem is that just about 0 fiction writers have ever been in a battle, or near one, or know anything at all about violence. Remarque was a bit of a con man but his WW1 battles are fascinating. T.E Lawrence and Robert Graves write well of their combat experiences. E.B.Sledge, Donald Burgett, and Audie Murphy from WW2 are all great, the greatest battle stories of all are Col. Hackworth’s stories from Korea and Vietnam. So far as I can tell Tolkien didn’t know much about anything at all, though I like Fellowship of The Ring because it’s about friendships and Elves, and Elves are hot.
Depends:
I think the best comic-book fight ever was between Korvac and The Avengers.
YES, I have never read the novel but this bugged me too. Recall earlier in the movie Heliumites even rescue Dejah from those weird steroided out version of the green warriors that overpower Carter, the Heliumite ship saves everyone. But then with no further info they realize they have new allies.
I remember really liking the battle scenes in Brian Jacques Redwall series, and those are children’s books.
But on the whole I agree with the OP.
Tolkien - and C. S. Lewis - both saw combat in WW1; I’d say that qualifies as knowing something about anything at all.
If you’re bored by battles in fiction you’re simply reading the wrong authors. It follows that the better the writer the more gripping the battle. Tolkien’s battles bored me rigid too. For the way it should be done read, for example, Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace. Boring it is not.
I am not saying that the Battle of the Five Armies description was too long (not that the fact you point to of it being told in largely in flashback would be inconsistent with that), but that it was uninteresting. In fact, so far as I could ever see, there is no good reason why the battle is in the book at all (except to kill of Thorin, I suppose, but that could have been done earlier, by Smaug, maybe). It always seemed out of place to me. Suddenly, out of nowhere, without any real foreshadowing, all these freaking armies show up and start slaughtering one another. Then they are done, and, apart from Thorin being dead, nothing has really changed.
As I remember, the actual description of the actual fighting at Battle of the Black Gate, it is mostly about Pippin killing the big troll. This also always seemed gratuitous to me, irrelevant to teh story, but shoved in so that Pippin (like Merry, in the much better bit about him, Eowyn, and the Lord of the Nazgûl) would get his fair at turn at being “heroic” in the sense of killing something big and nasty.
Oh I just remembered a example in visual media that I thought was mostly well done, which was in the TV show Game Of Thrones and the battle at the Wall. Most of it was well done, but the actual sword fighting parts ended up looking kind of laughable because you have a crowd of people and they are like tapping swords together and then run to a next person, and repeat, and repeat. I remember laughing that it looked like some kind of dance, not brutal one on one violence. I get that they needed those characters to stay alive, but also wanted them to be in the action, but it went on too long and needed to be better edited.
Like I said the rest of the episode was very gripping and a good depiction of a battle.
EDIT:I assume in a real battle opposing sides would not run around each other tapping swords, allies would be ganging up whenever possible and using superior numbers to kill the enemy. Even inside a castle lines would be formed and held, people wouldn’t be giving each side room to dash around.
Most of the time they’re boring and hard to follow.
Gods yes.
The sole exception: Emile Zola’s La Débâcle. Not only the battle scenes themselves, but everything leading up to them (movement/location of troops, cavalry, artillery, etc), the supply chain, the geography, are absolutely riveting.
I love Zola’s writing in general, but I think this particular novel also works for me because one of my other interests is moviemaking failures. There are a lot of similarities, as it turns out.