I have had a copy of War and Peace on my bookcase for the better part of a decade without once cracking it. It seemed destined to be the quintessential doorstop. And though books like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix proved that big, thick, heavy books needn't be everlasting doorstoppers, the fact remains that I was intimidated. War and Peace's reputation as a big read is proverbial, with heavy going through crowds of characters, a vast sweep of events, and long stretches of dry prose in which the plot goes nowhere; and that's without accounting for the strange manners of Russian noblemen in the time Napoleon, and references to characters by first name and patronymic (such as "Pyotr Kirillovich"), which come naturally to native Russian speakers but which tend to blur together for everyone else. And then there was the question of time. What time was I going to spend reading this book, when I have little enough time to read the myriads of books that I actually expect to enjoy?

And then one day I found the answer written on my windshield. For some time now, I've been looking through that windshield for anywhere between ninety minutes and two hours every business day. I had used up all my patience with the available radio programming, had found out that keeping my car freshly stocked with CDs of classical music was a lot of work, and had happily moved on to a series of audiobooks borrowed from the County Library, when it hit me: Now was the perfect time to read The Book You Always Said You Were Going To Read Someday. And with British actor Frederick Davidson reading it aloud to me while I drove, it would be painless. Or, at any rate, I would be a captive audience, prevented by my seat belt from putting the book down and leaving the room to do something else, should any distraction come a-temptin'. So I took out Tolstoy's masterpiece in two thick sets of disks, 47 in all, and immersed myself in it while my body went through the mechanical motions of driving to work and home again each day. For, like, 5 weeks.

First, I must give Davidson his due for making the best of what must be one of the toughest jobs in the recorded-book industry. I am aware that authors and professional readers differ as to how much an audiobook reader should dramatize the book. How far should he go in playing characters with distinct voices? How much should he ham it up? With most books, however, there is room for a wide range of interpretation. With a book like War and Peace, a worldwide cultural treasure featuring some 40 speaking characters, an actor must walk a vanishingly thin line between atrocious taste and incomprehensible tedium. Nevertheless, Frederick Davidson kept his balance from one end of the highwire to the other, presenting each of the main characters with his or her distinctive voice without ever stepping away from his role as the storyteller.

Tolstoy, however, doesn't manage this last trick. I risk heresy by finding fault with what is widely accepted as the greatest novel in world literature, just as I risk becoming absurd after cheerfully recommending a thousand inferior books with scarcely a quibble, but there it is. Tolstoy's 1869 novel set a new standard for novelists to strive toward, and he set some then-groundbreaking precedents in their approach to storytelling, but he could not do so without risking some structural awkwardness. And awkwardness is what I call it when the narrator pauses increasingly often in the latter parts of his tale to deliver himself of fragments of a treatise on the historiography of the Napoleonic Wars and, in an inexorable crescendo of abstraction, on the philosophy of history in general. I call this "groundbreaking" where, in its earlier instances, it foreshadows the journalistic approach of many of today's most exciting authors, who move between fact, fiction, and philosophy with an ease that stimulates the mind as much as it entertains. I call this "awkward" where, particularly at the end of the novel, the ponderous inertia of the nonfiction material staggers, and finally stops, the forward momentum of the story. Fair warning: Leo Tolstoy does not shut up until long, long after the story is over.

But it's one serious story. No, I tell a lie; it's a thick, complex braid of stories, all bound up around the wars involving France's Emperor Napoleon and Russia's Tsar Alexander I. The novel embraces events between 1805 and 1820, with special emphasis on the 1812 war in which Napoleon led a vast army into Russia and advanced as far as Moscow without losing a single battle, only to turn tail in a disastrous retreat that ultimately cost him his empire. Between attempts to reshape his readers' view of history from a series of deeds accomplished by geniuses and heroes to a tissue of accidents in which luck, chance, and the dutiful persistence of a bunch of historical nobodies told the tale, Tolstoy as if by accident tells his.

The main characters (you may want to make a note of this, in case there's a quiz), judging by who ends up alive and happily married at the end of the book, are siblings Nikolai and Natasha Rostov, the middle two of four children belonging to a cash-strapped provincial count; Pierre Bezukhov, the favorite and thereby best-educated of his father's numerous "natural" children, who by inheritance becomes one of the richest men in Russia without having the first idea what to do with all his money; and Maria Bolkonsky, the pious daughter of a landed prince whose eccentricity and cruelty have made her a lonely, lifelong martyr. A lot happens before they get to be happy couples, however. Nikolai gets involved with a poor orphaned cousin named Sonya, who is neither designing enough for you to hate properly, nor self-sacrificing enough for you to love. Sonya breaks the heart of a ruthless scoundrel named Dolokhov, who retaliates by cheating Nikolai out of a fortune at cards and, later, plays a role in Natasha's disgrace. Natasha, meanwhile, breaks the heart of Nikolai's friend Denisov, who later shares your heartbreak when the Rostovs' youngest child gets himself killed while hero-worshiping Dolokhov. Natasha is also vaguely courted by a cynically ambitious young brave named Boris Drubetskoy, who seems like a nice enough lad at the beginning of the book, only to leave you rejoicing to see him married to an irritating ninny named Julie Karagina.

Then Natasha gets engaged with Maria's brother Andrei, whose first wife died in childbirth after he miraculously returned from the dead, having been wounded and taken prisoner by the French at the Battle of Austerlitz (1805). But an adventurer named Anatole Kuragin plays a vile trick on Natasha, and so her romance with Andrei goes into Tragedy Mode, lightened only by a deathbed reunion after Prince Andrei fares less miraculously at the Battle of Borodino (1812). Luckily for Natasha, Pierre is waiting in the wings, having loved her all along even though he foolishly married Hélène Kuragina (Anatole's equally vile sister, foisted on Pierre by her manipulative and greedy father). Tolstoy drives with one tire on the solid white line of propriety in order to give us enough hints to understand that Hélène dies of complications from an abortion, as a result of trying to be married to three husbands at the same time. Nikolai and Maria have, in the meantime, fallen in love with each other, but the Rostov family's financial embarrassment almost proves to be an impediment to their union in the final real crisis of the novel.

There. If a shorter synopsis of the main plotlines of War and Peace can be given, I would like to see it. Even so, I haven't begun to describe the novel's relish in the customs and living conditions of its period, the problems uniting (and sometimes dividing) the rude Russian peasantry and the sometimes repulsive, in many cases monoglot French-speaking noblepersons who literally owned them. You get to meet Napoleon and the Russian commanders who confronted him in some of western history's biggest battles up to that time. You get to go along on a fox hunt, a fancy-dress ball, a number of dinner parties, an affair of honor, and even some of the secret rites of the Masonic Lodge. You get to meet politicians, soldiers, cads, hussies, flawed but sympathetic heroines, foolish men who grow into admirable characters, and a handful of people too lovable to live long in this world, along with mobs, demagogues, fools (some of them holy fools), gossips, wits, traitors, and (singled out as the worst sort of people) diplomatists. Some of them are real, historical people. Others merely represent the types of people Tolstoy imagined when he thought of his grandparents as young adults.

It would have to be a big novel to deal with all of this. With a good reader selling it to you, in spite of the sometimes tedious speculative passages, War and Peace seems big enough without being too big. And now that I've been dunked in it, I have lost my fear of it. So I think it likely that I will really read the doorstop that has been holding down the bottom shelf of my bookcase for the past decade. I may also invest in a video of the Oscar-winning, 1968 Soviet film based on the book, or (even more likely) in a recording of the opera version by Sergei Prokofiev, which I listened to many years ago without the benefit of having read the book. It's really that strong a story. And it doesn't hurt that it shows a remarkable side of one of the greatest conflicts in history, about a people whose apparent weaknesses prove to be Reason #1 why you should never mess with them. I daresay if Hitler had read this book with even the slightest comprehension, he would never have invaded the Soviet Union. And if I had read it ten years ago, I could be on my twentieth time through it by now...

Robbie Fischer
St. Louis, USA

Recommended Age: 16+

If you would like to contact Robbie, you may do so here.