"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time; so the book begins. Billy experiences sequences from his life in a random order. Lying down to sleep as a middle-age man he wakes up as a prisoner of war in Germany in the Second World War; moving through a door way, he is an old man in the future and hearing a song, he is back in his childhood. At one point in his life, Billy is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, an alien race that experience time as a fourth dimension that they can move back and forward in as they please. They keep him in a zoo for several years with Montana Wildhack, another kidnapped Earthling and movie star, with whom he mates with. They explain to him the nature of time and that it's not all linear and moving in a single direction so that when someone dies, it is only in that part of time that they are dead but have been and always will be alive in another part of time. So it goes. As a young man, Billy attends six months at college to become an optometrist, before being drafted into the war in Europe. After the war, Billy returns home to Ilium, New York and marries a rich optometrist's obese daughter, and raises two children. Years later Billy is the sole survivor of a plane crash, which leaves him comatose for several weeks, during which his wife dies in a car accident while rushing to his hospital bedside. After recovering, Billy goes on to tell the world about what he has learned about the Tralfamadorians and the nature of time before he is assassinated by a laser-beam while giving a public address on UFOs in 1976 after World War Three. He had always known this was how he was going to die because he had visited his death several times. During the war Billy was captured by the Germans in the battle of the bulge and sent to work in Dresden, where he witnessed the allied firebombing of the city on the night of the 13th February 1945 that was responsible for killing over 25,000 civilians. Billy along with the other POWs and four guards survived the attack inside an underground meat locker, slaughterhouse-five, which had been their temporary home during their service. Edgar Derby, a fellow POW is tried and shot for stealing a teapot from a collapsed bomb shelter while helping to clean up the city after the attack, and one morning, not long after, the war is over and Billy finds himself a free man. While walking the streets, a bird says to Billy "Poo-tee-weet?"; so the book ends.

Slaughterhouse five is a somewhat semi-autobiographical account of the Second World War and the firebombing of Dresden; Vonnegut was actually an American POW in the Second World War and witnessed the fire-bombing, escaping the ensuing firestorm by staying inside the disused slaughterhouse as Billy Pilgrim did. The opening chapter is written explicitly from the voice of Vonnegut himself where he talks about the bombings and his struggle to structure a novel around his experience. Throughout the rest of the novel, events are narrated and often Vonnegut identifies himself in the story: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book". The novel is satirical and is at times both funny and harrowing; events are described in loose detail, the facts are stated straight up from the start and then down the track the story returns to each event and describes it in more detail. The satire and absurdity of the story seem to be a sort reaction to the horrors of war witnessed by Vonnegut and the inability to write anything sensible about a massacre (likewise Billy and Eliot Rosewater turn to the topsy-turvyness of science fiction while recovering from post-traumatic stress from the war). Similarly, one interpretation of Billy's uncontrolled time travel is that it is a product of the trauma he has sustained during the war. The novel explores the notion of determinism and free will; Billy is taught by the Tralfamadorians that all moments in time simply exist and have always existed the way they are and that of all the species in the universe only Humans have any notion of the concept of free will.

This was a great read; short and immensely readable. I loved all the little humorous vignettes of Billy's life and the characters in them. I really liked all the different characters Vonnegut paints such as the nasty, rugged-up Roland Weary and his delusions of grandeur, Paul Lazzaro and his lust for revenge and the weird and jaded Kilgore Trout. The novel is all the more amazing because a lot of the events really happened and were witnessed by the author. The novel has only a loose claim as being science fiction; it's more a sort of post-modernist satire where the time travel and aliens are more mechanisms that are symbolic of the post-traumatic stress experienced by the central character (and presumably the author). Still really glad it was on the list such that I got to experience it. Recommended reading.