Now Playing: Howard Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack, "The Black Gate Is Closed."

Yesterday evening I finished For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Up front: this piece of literature would be R-rated for those of you who don't like language, sex, and violence. Hemingway's use of the objectionable elements in his narrative isn't necessarily gratuitous, but it's not exactly a light read either.

Set in the Spanish Civil War in the 1900s, For Whom the Bell Tolls focuses not so much on war itself as on everyday life. However, although the war may not occupy the novel's foreground, its pressure forces into startling clarity the tiny details of human existence: smells, sounds, moods, tastes. The novel's characters live in an intensified reality, a reality that exacts every particle of their attention. One of the themes is perfectly summed up in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":

"Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life...."

Facing the transience of life due to the pressure of war, Hemingway's characters experience as much of life as they can, both pleasure and pain. Indeed, experience, not faith, is at the heart of the novel. In the final scenes, as two of the main characters say good-bye, the dialogue echoes that of John 17, where Christ prays that He will be in His disciples and they in Him. Hemingway reverses this prayer: the character promising an eternal presence with his beloved has been a liar throughout the novel.

Although the novel may be a critique of faith in some ways, in other ways it beautifully captures the transient pleasures of human existence. Hemingway's narrative style permits moments of intense narrative clarity and powerfully realistic depictions of changes in human emotion. At any given point in the novel, the characters function as a photographically accurate microcosm of humanity.

The startling accuracy of Hemingway's style, coupled with a poignant foreshortening of human life against the backdrop of war, make the book a worthwhile read.