MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
This is the complete review as it appears at my blog dedicated to reading, writing (no 'rithmatic!), movies, & TV. Blog reviews often contain links which are not reproduced here, nor will updates or modifications to the blog review be replicated here. Graphic and children's reviews on the blog typically feature two or three images from the book's interior, which are not reproduced here.Note that I don't really do stars. To me a book is either worth reading or it isn't. I can't rate it three-fifths worth reading! The only reason I've relented and started putting stars up there is to credit the good ones, which were being unfairly uncredited. So, all you'll ever see from me is a five-star or a one-star (since no stars isn't a rating, unfortunately).I rated this book WORTHY!WARNING: THERE MAY BE UNHIDDEN SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!According to wikipedia, Richard Hooker's real name was Richard Hornberger. He died in 1997. I'm not sure why a guy by the last name of Hornberger would change it to Hooker! That's hardly an improvement in my opinion, but I guess it's his choice! It was his experience working in the 8055th M.A.S.H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) during the Korean war that gave him the background for the story. Here again is a case where a novel that turned out to be successful was rejected repeatedly by Big Publishing&Trade; despite the runaway success of its spiritual predecessor, which was Joseph Heller's renowned Catch-22 which I reviewed in February 2014. The two novels are very different though.Hooker worked on this novel for eleven years, we're told and then had a sports writer polish it before William Morrow had the smarts to pick it up and publish it in 1968. It was pretty much immediately turned into a movie starring Donald Sutherland as the main character Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, which I also review on my blog. It led, two years later, to the long-running TV show. I was never a fan of the TV show. It kinda sucked. The movie, which I enjoyed, is closest to the novel, but it excludes a lot perforce. You have to actually read the novel, which is quite short, to get the full flavor of the joy and humor of this excellent story, or listen to the audio book narrated by Johnny Heller, as I did.The novel (as does the movie) begins with Duke Forrest and Hawkeye Pierce arriving at unit 4077 (the double natural). They have traveled there by jeep over a long day and have bonded on the journey. Colonel Henry Blake, their CO, puts then on night shift and they billet with Major Jonathan Hobson, a highly religious guy who spends a lot of time praying. In the movie, they conflate this guy with Major Frank Burns, and in the TV show they conflate Burns with Charles Emerson Winchester III.Life in the camp is a series of days with literally nothing to do, punctuated harshly and violently with endless hours in surgery as soldiers are brought in from the latest offensive or defensive. The hi-jinks and trouble-making naturally occur during the surgical downtimes, but the two new surgeons prove themselves highly competent, and are soon liked by pretty much everyone despite their lax attitude outside of the OR. Friction soon erupts with Hobson, and eventually the other two talk Blake into sending him home. Blake in the novel is nothing like either of the Blakes on the screen.As their experience of the types of injury grows, Pierce and Forrest decide they're getting too many chest injuries that neither feels very expert at tackling, so they prevail upon Blake to get a "chest cutter" and he shows up in the form of "Trapper" John McIntyre, who is cold and distant to begin with, but eventually warms to his situation and the two men with whom he shares a tent. Their domain is known as the Swamp (after Hooker's own billet in Korea) and the three together are frequently referred to in the narrative as "The Swamp Men".The chaplain had quite a role in the TV series, but in the movie and the novel he's very much a minor character. Since he's Catholic, Forrest, a protestant, demands a like-minded chaplain, but the one they get is completely clueless and likes to write peppy letters to families about their wounded sons. This idiotic misrepresentation finally goes too far, and the Swamp men threaten to burn him on a cross at one point. This is omitted from both the movie and the TV show. The movie does retain the funeral of Captain Waldowski, the camp dentist, which is never actually a funeral. He is depressed however, so they hold a service and drop him from a helicopter. After he sobers up the next day he's fine.The Swamp men also take a dislike to Major Frank Burns because he's a jerk whose only real skill seems to be his facility with open heart massage. Both Duke and trapper deck him at one time or another, and Blake is furious. It's at this point that Major Margaret Houlihan, a stickler-for-rule-rules chief nurse shows up. She sides with burns and detests the Swamp men as an unruly, disrespectful rabble. This culminates in a fight which Pierce provokes and Burns falls right into. The fight is witnessed by Blake, who sends Burns home, and bitches out the swamp men for now depriving him of two surgeons.Another incident missed from the movie is the Ho-Jon affair. The Swamp Men pretty much adopt their Korean houseboy, and when he's drafted into the Korean army, they try to keep him out of it. He comes back to them wounded and after saving his life, decide to sponsor him to attend Pierce's own college. They raise money for this by selling signed photographs of Trapper John dolled up to look like Jesus Christ. People actually buy these and before long they have several thousand dollars and off goes ho-Jon.In a sequence very similar to that depicted in the movie, Trapper and Hawkeye are tapped to fly to Japan to perform surgery on the son of a US congressman, and they take advantage of this to tighten up their golf technique. They also fix up a child who is being taken care of in the local pediatric hospital-cum-whorehouse.One of the most amusing sections, for me, was when Blake is ordered to Tokyo and is expected to be gone for several weeks, so a temporary CO is drafted in and although he isn't too bad, the Swamp men want to avoid him. In a sequence reminiscent of the man who saw everything twice form Catch-22, the three of them come up with a plan to convince the temporary CO that Pierce is in need of psychiatric treatment. The three of them get to go for evaluation, talking of mermaids and epileptic whores. The way this is written is hilarious, but it's entirely omitted from the movie, which by-passes this and jumps straight to the football game.The movie portrays it slightly differently, but in the novel, Radar is calling plays based on his supernatural senses, and with twenty-twenty-twenty-four points on the board, the opposition's sedated (or at least their leading player is), and because Pierce got Blake to bring a in professional football player who is also a surgeon, the 4077th squeaks by with a 28-24 win and makes a mint out of it.The story winds down a bit flatly, with nothing going on, and the original two, Forrest and Pierce pretending to have battle fatigue and presenting themselves as chaplains, so they have an easy ride and no work to do. I had one major issue throughout this novel which was Hooker's addiction to adding "he said" after very nearly every speech. It became annoying in short order in the audio version; maybe reading it yourself would make it feel less glaring. I don't know. I could have done without that, but on balance I recommend this novel. It's not the classic which Catch-22 is, but it is a decent second-best. It parallels Catch-22 in some regards, but it is its own novel, just as goofy, although rather less crazy. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in war stories with a humorous angle.
Three Blind Mice tMASH by Richard Hooker is the dramatic book before the 1970’s film. It’s about three army surgeons in the Korean War. Captains Duke Forrest, Hawkeye Pierce,and John McIntyre aka Trapper John. They have very little to work with the supplies and technology of their time. This book is humorous but yet Mr. Hooker doesn't leave out the drama and sorrow of all the death of war. This book has a movie and TV show that I highly recommend you see after you read the book. For the reason the book will give you much more in depth on who the characters are. As a reader I enjoy comedy and drama that is why I decided to read this book it is the perfect genre for my liking and I wasn't disappointed. MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. They are located just off the from lines of the war. This book is a very good read it’s something that draws you in and keeps you interested and gives you the best of two worlds, comedy and drama. When it comes to the comedy it was very funny and gives you some laughs, but it will turn around and become very serious on you such as when they lose a patient or get in a fight about something. I had experience with this from the TV show when I used to watch the old rerun episodes with my dad and they are fairly similar, plus they both will make you laugh uncontrollably at times with their good one line jokes and all of their teasing and poking fun. There isn't a specific point in the book that I would say that stood above the rest but the best parts seem to be when they joke around with each other. This book will give you a bit of a feel of what the medical urgency of war is like. I highly recommend this book especially if you have seen the show or movie.
What do You think about MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors (1997)?
I picked this book up as part of an academic interest in how books translate into screenplays (and how those screenplays then translate into films), not expecting to enjoy it very much. These days, sexual harassment humor just bothers me, and I rarely sympathize with characters who are complete jerks, which is how the main characters in the film and the T.V. show come across. I was pleasantly surprised, though, that large chunks of the book are genuinely funny, and it really becomes a study in how the stress of war unhinges the mind. This is far from a flawless book, of course. It's misogynistic and racist, as expected. But it's also narratively clunky, reading like the reminiscing of a grandpa who always forgets to give you the key details you need to understand what he's talking about. I doubt anyone who isn't familiar with the military could make heads or tails out of large chunks of it. There's also the persistent problem that plagues books that are semi-autobiographical, but with key details changed and characters composited, that wide swaths of it are self-contradictory or just plain don't make sense. Pierce, for example, is portrayed as a lobsterman's son whose brothers are always in and out of jail, and yet he's named after a founding father and a former President who attended the same exclusive liberal arts college he did -- character details that scream "scion" rather than "yokel." And either the 8th Army is the smallest force we ever sent overseas and only recruited from three colleges and two football teams, or the coincidences of who knew who before they were assigned together would make Charles Dickens curl up in disbelief. It's also worth noting, all of you who bitch about indie books being riddled with typos, that this is a 2001 edition from Harper Collins of a novel that's pushing 50 years old, and the copy editing is every bit as bad. Books have always had typos, and some of the wrong-word errors in this one are funnier than the actual jokes. What did impress me is how much detail we get about the medical side of serving in a MASH unit. Large portions of the story hinge on the nuances of meatball surgery, and Hooker doesn't hold back, and doesn't skimp on the explanations -- but doing so concisely and in a way that is never boring.Ultimately, this turns into a good study in insanity -- whether deliberately or not -- and has a lot of genuine laughs. Certainly not for everyone, but interesting and engaging nonetheless.
—Kyle Aisteach
I really liked this for two reasons: the characters and the narrative voice. First, the voice. It's strong; so strong that it makes the main characters sound pretty much the same. Usually such homogenisation is a problem, but here I find it works rather well. The blending of the personalities creates a pleasant bond in a mad world.The tone is smartly judged. It's hilarious, yet quietly so. By this I mean I find myself thinking back to plot events and finding them insanely funny. (One example is
—Roz Morris
I grew up with the M*A*S*H tv show and loved it, as well as the movie. So it was only natural that I read the book they were all based upon. Prior to reading this I hadn't realized the author was himself an Army surgeon in Korea during the war, and while the book is fiction, the events and characters were all based on real-life people and their antics.In light of the huge impact the movie and tv show had on American culture, this is quite an important novel for without the book we wouldn't have had anything else. For that reason alone I enjoyed reading it. And it was a fun read. I do think the book wasn't very well written, and had it not been immortalized on film it would have been quickly lost to time. But if you can ignore that (remember it was written by a physician, and not by a trainer writer) you can just go ahead and enjoy it for its inherent entertainment value.
—g-na
