A Fable
by William Faulkner
Summary
On a Monday in May 1918, a French regiment ordered over the top refuses to attack. The mutiny is the work of a corporal and his twelve followers, who have moved through the armies preaching, in effect, that the war continues only because the men consent to it. The Germans, facing the silent trenches, do not attack either, and for a moment the Western Front simply stops.
What the novel is about is what power does next. The generals of both sides confer, secretly and cooperatively, because the peace breaking out below them threatens the institution they all serve, and the war is restarted from above. The corporal is arrested with his twelve, one of whom betrays him, and is executed between two thieves; his body is returned to his wife and sisters for burial in a village churchyard. The allegory is exactly as visible as Faulkner wanted it, down to the old Marshal who commands the Allied armies and who confronts the corporal, before the execution, in a long temptation scene that carries the book's whole argument between authority and hope.
This is late Faulkner at maximum density: enormous sentences, a horse theft parable folded in from another register, and almost no concessions. It is generally agreed to be a hard book, and honest booksellers say so.
Around four hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who already know Faulkner and want to see him gamble a decade on one idea; nobody should start here, and The Reivers is the friendlier of his two Pulitzers by a mile.
Historical Context & Significance
A Fable won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1955, the fullest official endorsement American letters could give, for the book that posterity has rated lowest among Faulkner's major efforts. He worked on it for more than a decade, longer than anything else he wrote, and said while writing it that he meant it to be the best work of his life and maybe of his time.
The prizes arrived in the glow of the 1949 Nobel, and the suspicion has always been that they honoured the ambition and the laureate more than the achievement. Critics then and since have found the allegory both too plain and too buried, and the phrase failed masterpiece attached itself early and stuck; academic defenders periodically mount a case for it as his great political novel.
For the record it shares with The Reivers: Faulkner won two fiction Pulitzers, and neither went to the great Yoknapatawpha novels on which everything rests, a mismatch the prize has repeated with some regularity.