At the age of eighteen Jan Montyn was learning how to cross a ravine hanging from a rope; at nineteen he was serving in the Baltic on a German minesweeper; by the time he was twenty he was enduring the mud, snow and slaughter of the trenches on the Eastern front; before he was twenty-one he had lived through the hell of the Allied bombing of Dresden, played cat-and-mouse with the Russian army in a last-ditch stand on the banks of the Oder, retreated across Germany into the arms of Allied forces, escaped from a POW camp and joined the Foreign Legion. A few years later he was at war again, in Korea.
An adventure story on the grandest scale? Rather one of horrific experience and of a sensitive mind driven to obliterate the terrors of the past by a further dose of the same medicine.
Coming from a childhood hidebound by the most rigid structures of Dutch Calvinism, the young Montyn had seen the German Occupation of Holland and the wider opportunities it offered as the dawn of a new freedom. He had joined the German navy in a spirit of bravado, only to find himself trapped in the final, agonising throes of Germany's defeat in the Second World War and to live through the worst that men and machines can inflict on each other.
As an artist it affected him deeply, leaving him prey to hidden terrors and nightmares. From being a devotee of war he became a confirmed pacifist.
Written in collaboration with one of Holland's leading young novelists, A Lamb to Slaughter is a deep and haunting book of exceptional skill, a catalogue of strife and bloodshed whose message is peace and hope. Through years of restless pain Jan Montyn has struggled to come to terms with his baptism of horror - through debauchery, madness and the catharsis of remembering, through his art and the healing balm of the Buddhist faith.
His story is that of a man haunted by battlefields, who now seeks them out, not as a participant but for the essential tranquility he finds amid the aftermath of war. His book is an unforgettable literary experience, a moving evocation of the human paradox that transcends its immediate theme to assail our deepest sensibilities.
Enough agony and adventure for a dozen lives packed into a fastpaced, breathless, often gripping book. Montyn (a successful painter very well served here by novelist-co-author Kooiman and translator Dixon) was born about 1925 to a joyless, conservative, Calvinist family in a Dutch village called Oudewater. This peaceful tedium was shattered by the Nazi occupation. The naive, apolitical Montyn dodged compulsory factory work by volunteering to go to Hitler Youth Camps in Austria, where he and his lover, Hein, were recruited by a femme fatalesecret agent, who got them to sabotage a Nazi supply train. Later Montyn drifted into the German Navy and just missed drowning when his torpedo boat was sunk in the Baltic. From there he was unceremoniously drafted into the Army and shipped to Courland, where he lived through the horrors of the winter of 1944 on the Eastern Front and saw Hein die right before his eyes. Seriously wounded, sent back to Liepaya (his hospital boat was torpedoed), Montyn risked his life by going A.W.O.L. to Holland, returned to Austria, got to Dresden just in time to see it annihilated, fought by the Oder (where he killed a Russian soldier), and finally fled West to surrender to the Americans. In later episodes he escaped the P.O.W. camp, joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted, did time for his Nazi years, fought in the Korean War, led a wild, drunken life in the Dutch Army, ran orgies for his superior officers, had a mental breakdown, escorted war orphans and maimed children from Southeast Asia to Europe and America, was captured and nearly shot by the South Vietnamese after entering Vietnam with the Pathet Lao - among other things. The outline of Montyn's narrative gets ragged and confused toward the end; and, though it does come to a resolution (after a tragic homosexual love and a failed heterosexual affair, he marries happily and has a daughter), the rapid succession of vivid, painful pictures obscures its autobiographical shape. Still, a whirlwind of a story, told with passion and art. (Kirkus Reviews)
