O'Hara's Choice

Having read what i thought were ALL of Leon Uris novels, O'Hara's Choice has been a great surprise. Having served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam conflict, this book has a very good insight as to how the Marine Corps evolved and the struggles it went through to establish a place in the history of America. Mr. Uris (also a Marine) has a perfect picture of the Marine Corps. Combined with his novel Battle Cry, a reader will get from the bottom up, a reality of what makes young men WANT to be a Marine.

Perhaps I was spoiled by Leon Uris' fine work, Trinity, and expected too much from a novel dashed off late in his writing career. Whatever the reason, I came to O'Hara's Choice with high expectations, too high as it turned out. The novel is little but a high-class "bodice ripper," a modern romance with no well developed theme and poorly justified actions. The characters appear flat as well, leaving the novel very much as they entered it with little discernible character development en route. Let's take a look first at the strong points of the book. Unfortunately, this will not take us long.Uris does have a fine command of the language and has produced 394 pages without allowing trite, overused phraseology to weaken either description or dialogue. At rare times, the writing does flow at a rapid clip, carrying the reader along almost effortlessly, and I offer the description of the battle of Bull Run (to become known as the first battle of Manassas) as a welcome example of this. The early sexual tension between Zach and Amanda is also handled adroitly although elsewhere it sometimes mimics the "bodice ripper" genre. The inter-service jealousy and derision between the Navy and the Marine Corps is realistically portrayed but becomes tedious and repetitious after a while. Horace Kerr's internal dichotomy between his progressive thoughts toward the recently-freed Negroes and his culturally learned biases against non-white races comes to the fore several times, but some of his explosions are not well supported by earlier thoughts and actions and appear artificial and contrived. So much for the strong points.Uris' introduction of the various characters strikes me as poorly accomplished. It is as though one is watching a disconnected slide show (or, for our younger readers who may never have seen a slide show, let's call it a PowerPoint presentation). Characters pop up rather unexpectedly, and the reader has a poor idea of what their relationship may be to the other characters until much further along in the reading. Fortunately, Uris begins each chapter with the date and location of the action. These "stage directions" do help keep us somewhat oriented as to where and when we are, but we must be careful top pay attention to them or risk significant confusion.Several "red herrings" crop up here and there with no particular contribution to the story line. For instance, Horace Kerr, Amanda's rich industrialist father, is set up to lose his life in a storm at sea but survives with a few bumps and bruises. Later he is equally foreshadowed to suffer a debilitating if not fatal stroke, but that coup de grace never comes after all.Then there is Emily, Amanda's older sister, who is mentally unbalanced and is generally stored away out of sight in the unfrequented north wing of the mansion. I suppose she functions fairly well as one of several skeletons in the Kerr family closet, a fact that is strongly underscored once the reader finally learns the horrible secret that explains her insanity. Still, she never plays even a strong supporting role in the Amanda - Zach relationship, which is the unifying thread throughout the book, and the reader is left to wonder whether her character might have been more fully developed--or omitted.Is there even an identifiable theme in this novel? Basically we find two young lovers, one torn between her duty to carry on the family fortune and power and her desire to marry her Marine lover; the other torn between his love (or lust) for Amanda and his "marriage" to the Marine Corps. The latter problem is exacerbated by a dreadful secret that Zach carries with him concerning his Marine-hero father. None of these conflicts ever finds satisfactory resolution. There is no denouement. The lovers are conflicted to begin with and are equally conflicted when the novel ends. Their situation, while at times compared with that of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, never reaches the tragic level of those more famous lovers, whose position as the symbols of unachievable love remains unassailed by Uris' novel.

From the opening pages of Battle Cry, through Mila-18 and Exodus, Uris develops his fine stories of people in battle. Battle against prejudice, against poverty, against class structures, against themselves. This, his last novel, once more places people in jeopardy. Covering a period from just before the Civil War to the early 1890's, it is a tale of honorable men fighting to save what they believe in, most noticeably Uris' beloved Marine Corps, but also fighting for a chance to live life and love as they wish, to acknowledge the right of all to be free, and for honor itself.Zachary O'Hara is the model Marine; practically raised within the corps by his father, Paddy O'Hara, a Civil War Medal of Honor hero who, at one point or another, had saved most of the lives of the male characters in this book. Zachary must fight the battle common to children of famous parents, that of making his way in the world out from the shadow of his parent. His external battle takes the shape of drafting policy papers that will show the necessity of Marine Corps as a functioning part of the U. S. Military, both in the present time and in the foreseeable future, as in the late 1880's the general feeling was that the Marine Corps was a body that had outlived its usefulness.But this battle must take place alongside his battle to be able to love Amanda Kerr, daughter of ship-building magnate Horace. As Zachary is clearly below Amanda's station, marriage would seem to be out of the question - but Amanda herself is a strong-willed, intelligent woman who knows how to broker deals.With this as the skeleton upon which to construct his novel, it would seem that sure-handed Uris would have an easy time building a strong novel. But perhaps because Uris died before doing the final edits on this work, the novel comes off as somewhat disjointed, characters (especially the minor ones) not as clearly delineated as is normal for Uris, and occasional pieces of text are repeated, something I'm sure he would have eliminated had he had the chance. As it is, there are places that feel incomplete, dialogue that seems to assume the reader knows more than has been presented, and the prime story, that of ensuring the continuance of the Marine Corps, does not seem to carry the sense of urgency and criticality that I'm sure Uris intended the novel to portray. The historical backdrop of both national events and his character's past does not have enough detail to really make this era come alive. The climax of the story comes as something of a surprise, as only minimal hints about it have been set in earlier portions of the novel.What could have been a strong story of love and nation-building is compromised, leaving only the feeling of what could have been with perhaps another hundred pages and some strong editing. A disappointment from an author who almost never failed to engage both the hearts and minds of his readers.--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

I've been a lifelong fan of Leon Uris, but this was a huge disappointment. Plot wanders all over the place. Never manages to get back on track.I'm thinking he needed some money and whacked this one out solely for that purpose.

Good read, but bit too much on the romance side for my taste. I was a mite uncertain as to the historisity of the Corps material.

I had never seen this book in the days when Uris was popular it is a little departure from his normal style but an excellent story. Well worth the read

I love Leon Uris books. This was even better because it is about the early Marines. I have a vested interest in the Marines. It's a great story.

You can never miss with Leon Uris. Espectially with the Irish Trinity, Mila 18, and Exodus.