Wants are high on the agenda in Welsh poet and playwright Owen Sheers’ verse drama about the fortunes of three Bristol boys who set out for the British army garrison at Catterick and, soon after, to serve in Afghanistan, where they fast learn the meaning of the truncated, acronymic and euphemistic language of war. Intent less on “going someplace” than “leaving somewhere” these largely apolitical youths yearn to make their fortune, to have an adventure. Driven by the thought of “getting out, moving on,” as opposed to defending a nation or championing a cause, they join up because they “want more” than lives spent stacking shelves in the shopping mall and getting drunk at weekends. As their narrator and ring-leader, Arthur explains:

My idea, my plan, [was] to link our arms again, to go on a tour. To answer the chant of our school days with us, us, we want to play war.

The stories of what happens to the three friends, Hads, Taff, and Arthur are told with hindsight by these outgoing boys and their home-staying womenfolk in voices which turn quickly from buoyant to blunt, bitter and macabre. They are intended to engender a pause: to point to the physical and psychological consequences of “playing war.”

Published in the UK on the cusp of the centenary of the Great War, and at a time of gradual withdrawal of British and American troops from Afghanistan, Sheers’ lyric narrative has been praised for its capacity to evoke contemporary events “with the humanity of a Wilfred Owen” and bring “the pity of the far Afghan war into our own mind’s neighbourhood” (Dannie Abse). Woven into Pink Mist are a prefatory quotation from a medieval Welsh elegy for the Britonnic casualties of the battle of Catraeth, who died fighting against overwhelming odds; allusions to how the Second World War has shaped the landscape and life histories of the protagonists; and echoes of Homeric epic. These encourage the reader to consider Sheers’ 21st century lyric drama as written in dialogue with a millennia of war poetry; it invokes earlier traditions even as it foregrounds its claim to reflect, particularly through its characters’ use of contemporary military slang and Bristolean vernacular, specific temporal and regional realities.

Informed by the stories of service personnel and their families, Pink Mist was originally written under commission for BBC Radio, recorded on location in Bristol, and broadcast in March 2012. One suspects that the play’s ‘lyric’ contents prove more powerful when it is performed aloud, rather than read as a verse narrative. Without actors to enliven its words they lie somewhat leaden on the page, denoting scenes with technical precision — such as “a pair of plastic chairs / empty, lit up by the fires / turning reddish brown” after a “blue on blue” helicopter attack — but failing somehow to make a strong visual impact.

Certain images are intended to be striking, however. And it is over these — rather than the Under Milk Wood-like interplay between the plaintive and admonitory female and more muscular, self-exculpatory male voices — that one may linger in the hope of gaining a deeper insight into the sentiments of irony, outrage and pathos, which Sheers wishes to convey. For example, Pink Mist is framed by a vision which our focalising point, Arthur, recalls seeing when he was “only twelve” on a Clifton bridge, just “just past the Samaritans sign.” An “older man” of about 22 (the narrator’s age now), surely ex-army, calmly takes a drag on a cigarette before launching himself into the air and “flying” — presumably to his death. This confused image, combining sublimity with futility, precedes and precipitates the poem’s main events. For it is after this that the awestruck Arthur and his friends sign up for war, only to return maimed and emasculated, so traumatised that they end up living rough on the streets, or in ghostly form as “a fine spray of pink, a delicate mist,” after being hit by an IED. Pathos comes with the picture of the good-looking, green-eyed, half-Somali lad:

Hads Gullet, twenty-one, half a tall man trying to sleep Holding what’s left of his legs to his chest, as he tells himself … that of the half of him gone and the half of him left, it isn’t the cursed he should count, but the blessed.

The rhythms and half-rhymes drum the image of the rocking man home, reinforcing both his pitiful helplessness and his determination in a seemingly godless world to “count himself blessed.” Arthur’s strange encounter with the tender, attentive Staff Sergeants during his stay in the sweet-scented, refrigerated “Rose Cottage” is particularly poignant: we are both caught up with their young guest’s optimism, likewise half-believing that his remaining body parts have entered a place of rest and recuperation, and — when we realise that the “cottage” is a mortuary — touched by his naiveté. However, in general, profundity is lacking in Sheers’ poem: symbols or “signatures” of war are proposed, such as “a bloke with no legs / wincing in pain / as he shifts himself forward, inch by inch, / again and again,” but fail to impress a sense of their deeper significance, although they ring true.

Elsewhere, Sheers has praised the Second World War poet Keith Douglas’s use of “a language that loses none of its focus when observing the realities of war” (lyricism would mean “immense bullshitting”). Sheers describes his own stage play, The Two Worlds of Charlie F (2012), “inspired” by the experiences of soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, as an attempt to offer a “troops-eye view,” thereby creating not a “political” piece but a “theatrical rendering of what these men, women and their families have been through.” However, like The Guardian newspaper’s Michael Billington in his critique of Andrew Motion’s 2011 play Incoming, about a “cynically realistic” soldier killed in Helmand during the continuing Afghan conflict, I was left wanting Sheers to develop his anti-war arguments and to be more attentive in a geopolitical age of the impact of British actions. Unlike novels such as Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch, Pink Mist leaves the effects of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan on the region’s people largely unimagined. The enemy, always referred to as “them,” or “Terry Taliban,” is neither humanised nor differentiated. Civilians are only slightly less faceless: on one brief occasion a farmer and his shrapnel-impaled granddaughter are mentioned. Taff describes:

An outdoor man, skin leathered The way he unwrapped the end of his turban to wipe at his eyes, raw with what we’d done.

But rather than bringing about an awakening, engendering a sustained enquiry into the specific political circumstances of, and justifications for, his country’s going to war, this event brings about a narrowing of focus for the British soldier: he becomes obsessed with the idea of “punishment,” with the need to find “a god / some kind of law” that orders this belligerent chaos, and perhaps exonerates him.

Yet it seems to be Sheers’ point that he circumvents both pacifist rhetoric and patriotic spin, preferring — like Douglas — neither to take a particular political stance, nor to write cathartic, humanising “cries from the heart,” but to hammer out verse which makes “hard reading,” because its speakers can “only watch, describe and admit” to the killing with which they are complicit — and by which they will ultimately be consumed. The criticism Pink Mist does offer is not of governments or ideologues but — strikingly — of the “tightening down of pride and the bond” that initially brings the boys to it. As Arthur asserts, we should:

Forget queen or country, the mission or belief It’s more about keeping your mates alive ... Cos that’s what fuels war ... love, and grief

Although he briefly hints at their place in a wider (political) “debate” in which “reasons” for going to war are given, starting “the chant” again, Sheers ultimately uses Arthur to suggest that responsibility for the mental and physical incapacitation and death of their onetime school-friends and, later, compatriots, rests with the soldiers themselves. Perhaps Sheers does the veterans to whose charity a portion of the proceeds of his book will be donated some service in revealing how the camaraderie they may have craved as wanting “boys” has been exploited by the masters of a greater game. However, writing from a perspective conscious of the greater proximity of my readers to the theatre of war, and the people’s plight, I can’t help but think that there are other battles that Sheers might choose to fight when it comes to questioning and to representing the war in Afghanistan.

Madeline Amelia Clements's doctoral thesis at the University of East London explores contemporary South Asian fiction

Pink Mist

(PLAY)

By Owen Sheers

Faber and Faber, UK

ISBN 978-0-571-30264-2

87pp.