I just finished reading John Mort's novel, SOLDIER IN PARADISE. It blew me away. Mort writes in a deceptively simple style, but his story drew me in, SUCKed me in, keeping me up late turning pages - but slowly, in a thoughtful considering sort of way - and wondering what will happen next to his young-then-old narrator, Patrick "Irish" Donnelly and his rag-tag band of brothers - two of them actually, one bunch in Vietnam and the other, years later, in Florida. As I was reading this complex many-layered and Literary with a capital "L" tale, I kept wondering to myself: "How come I never heard of this book? It's been around for nearly fifteen years!"

Obviously SOLDIER IN PARADISE is one of those casualties of the publishing industry: a particularly fine novel that was launched with little fanfare, then promptly sank and disappeared. Well, as one of Irish's pals would have said, "Shee-ut!"

Mort, according to his jacket info, is a librarian in Kansas City, Missouri. (But he could be retired by now.) A librarian! Someone who loves books, loves good literature. And a guy with a wickedly dry sense of humor too, not shy about poking some gentle fun at himself as both a librarian and an aspiring writer. Irish casually mentions a male acquaintance of his - a single librarian - and the speculation that surrounded him about whether he might be gay. Implying subtly that the librarian job made him every bit as suspect as his bachelorhood. Then Irish mentions that he published "a few short stories in places nobody noticed. It mystified me at the time. I thought there'd be offers from Hollywood." This delivered in a totally deadpan self-deprecating voice, noting then that he was convinced he "was extraordinary." He then adds the kicker -

"History remembers the eccentric geniuses who succeeded. You never hear from the ones who merely IMAGINED that they were geniuses."

I was smiling as I read these lines, thinking this guy knows about things, knows his chances of success as a writer are small, but he writes anyway, and this book SHOULD have earned him a place in that "history." Hollywood SHOULD have come calling, but ... Well, what the hell, ya know?

Why is SOLDIER IN PARADISE so damn good? Hmm ... For me it was partly all the literary allusions he stuck in there. There's Milton, of course, considering the book's title, and its alternate chapters with the Vietnam jungle and Florida each representing a post-Fall Paradise, indeed PARADISE LOST. Here's an interesting Miltonian sample of Mort's monsoon-soaked jungle -

"... great ferns had lifted from the red mud, and there were violet mushrooms large as buckets, and vines in a mat all around, dripping with rain. Countless birds flew, fearlessly, ahead of us and over the revines below, hovering before the waterfalls like clouds, red, orange and white against the dazzling green. Over the green rolled a blue mist ..."

And Irish is a grunt who reads Dickens, and even enrolls in an English Lit correspondence course (learning, sadly, that probably no one reads his essays, which always come back with a rubber-stamped "100 Excellent" no matter what he writes).

There's a throwaway reference to MEN WITHOUT WOMEN, and what it does to those men. Consider the Jim Cole - Detroit twosome, whose furtive moonlit coupling Irish witnesses one night, mildly surprised at his own curiosity.

There's the Bible, of course, with quotes about smiting the enemy, and a scene with Norman Sims "coming down from the rock" and Lt. Dranow "pumped up, as if it were the Ten Commandments he offered." (Chaplains, by the way, fare very poorly in Mort's story.)

Norman Sims, the innocent Okie who wins a Silver Star for his unthinking bravery, is presented as a Billy Budd sort of figure, to be regarded by his squad members, alternately, with both scorn and wonder. And that Budd analogy keeps working in a later chapter, "World of Hurt," in which Irish reluctantly and guiltily escorts Norman to the Long Binh Jail ("LBJ"). I could not help but be reminded of another earlier Vietnam era novel, Darryl Ponicsan's THE LAST DETAIL, with its equally symbolic characters of Billy Buddusky and the innocent young sailor he was escorting to a Navy prison.

In the novel's final section, Mort invokes yet another, highly unlikely author, with the chapter title "Little Motel on the Prairie." In it Irish, alone, still mourning his dead comrades and trying to silence the ghosts of his past (hmm ... Dickens again?), is growing his own vegetables and planting apple trees, like that Woodstock song, trying to "get back to the garden." He thinks, finally: "It's good to sleep well, to eat apples you've grown, to study the stars, to move about in fine weather."

A "Literary" novel of Vietnam and its still-echoing aftermath? You're damned straight Literary: Milton, Melville, Dickens, Hemingway, Ponicsan, The Bible, and even Laura Ingalls Wilder. They're all in there. This John Mort fellow is a librarian - and a WRITER - who knows his literature and makes good use of it.

There are, inevitably, echoes of many other novels - and memoirs - of Vietnam here, probably too many to mention. But I'll mention two of my favorites. William Pelfrey's underrated THE BIG V - one of the first, and Karl Marlantes's MATTERHORN - one of the most recent. John Mort's SOLDIER IN PARADISE belongs in a place of prominence in this pantheon. I cannot recommend it highly enough. ( )