The war of all against all never changes…. except when it’s probably not.

Spoilers ahead, ye have been warned.

Julius Winsome has lived alone with his father in the woods for the majority of his life. He is 51 years old at the time the story takes place. At some point in all of those years, a woman called Claire wanders into his garden, invites herself for tea, and they embark on a brief relationship. It seems like she’s the first woman who’s actually taken some kind of interest in him. What’s shagging a 50-year-old virgin like? Apparently not good enough, because Claire gets him a dog and then buggers off back down the mountain to shack up with a local rozzer. Fair play, his pension’s better. They name the dog after famed social contract pessimist and English Civil War survivor Thomas Hobbes. War is one of the major themes of the book.

There are bits that makes me wonder whether Donovan had ‘lit fic’ “aspirations” with this. Julius spends a lot of time with lots of old books – 3,282 of them to be precise – and those old books just so happen to line up nicely with the literary canon – the kind of thing that gets your English professor wet in the morning. So not content to merely name drop “the greats”, Mr. Winsome takes to quoting bits of 17th Century dialect at dying men.

It’s an anachronistic novel for an anachronistic man – the weapons and sentiments are from the First World War, the words are from the tail end of the renaissance, and the man himself is meandering about the latter days of the 20th century.

“Can’t tell if I’m a little withdrawn, or dead dog said to quote-unquote live on a farm.”

Julius is at least a half-decent study on loneliness. Much of media is far too melodramatic about people who don’t live around others. 

They’re either wailing and weeping and completely ineffectual without latching onto someone else like a fictional leech with severe co-dependency issues. Or they’re insane psychopathic nutters who are one bad day away from becoming a spree killer. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when solitary characters are portrayed in a non-toxic fashion, they are often wildly over romanticised. The stock template lone mysterious strong independent whatever who don’t need nobody else and is entirely self reliant. Think ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog‘ by Caspar David Friedrich – that overused painting with the silly bitch on the cliff staring into the distance, constantly used in YouTube videos and twitter rants by neckbeard edgelords who misinterpret Nietzsche.

I think there’s a tendency for similarly solitary people to use loner characters as a bit of a psychological crutch for their own egos. If you are that person, let me help you: Nobody has ever thought of you as a lone badass or whatever. They never will. They just think you’re a bit sad. Like it or not, people are judgemental pricks like that.

Julius is a refreshingly on-point representation of the romanticised notion of the cabin in the woods crew. He’s absolutely fine to go about his life, and he understands and accepts his alienated state of being:

“Many men live in these woods who cannot live anywhere else; they live alone and are tuned close to any offense you might give them, best to keep your manners about you, and even better to have nothing to say at all. They come up north and wait out life, or they were here anyway and stayed for the same reason. Such men live at the end of all the long lanes in the world, and in reaching a place like this they have run out of country they can’t live in.”

The people in the nearby town who know of him think he’s weird. He’s clearly upset about Claire’s going, but he seems to be fine until someone purposefully kills his dog and then he gets a tad grouchy. Understandable. 

The dog is connected to Claire. Perhaps for this reason Julius is as distraught as he is over Hobbes’ death. The dog has come to stand in for Claire, becoming an unhealthy crutch for the unwitting mountain man, as opposed to a faithful companion.

I suppose you could read Julius’ penchant for quoting Shakespearean words at people bleeding to death to emphasise the distance between himself and the urban world, a man removed by time and space. But having it be Shakespeare specifically is why it misses the alienation nail – because you’ll find that, while pretentious, being able to quote classic plays and literature in society, is a common shorthand signifier for those aiming to present as cultured and educated, associated with the upper echelons of the social strata, rather than a strange loner from a cabin in the woods who does not know how to integrate with society.

Oh God, here we go. I’m always one for haphazard connections to Hobbesian social contract theory. You want to know where all your Battle Royales, Hunger Games, and Squid Games came from? Arguably, this bloke. That famous quote about how life is nasty, brutish and short? That’s in the first handful of pages of The Leviathan. From Hobbes we received the concept of the State of Nature, embodied by the ‘war of all against all’. Over the years I’ve had various paranoid ramblings on this concept and its relevance to the modern world, so the fact that it seemed to pop up unexpectedly in this one was a hook for me. But, as I said at the top, I’m not actually sure it’s anything more than a name drop or a vague half-formed allusion. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to dig through it, though. So, some malformed musings on this theme.

The Leviathan is the ruler to whom is sacrificed a measure of individual freedoms in order to gain the stability of civilisation, and allow us to escape the war of all against all. With their power and capacity for punishment, the Leviathan can maintain civilisation by retaliating against those who act against the will of the sovereign.

The social contract is an agreement by the population of a nation that they trade individual freedoms to the sovereign, the Leviathan in Hobbes’ reckoning, in exchange for the benefits of an organised society and enforced laws. Meaning they get the benefits of civilisation and don’t have to worry so much about getting murdered for an apple. 

Troy would be the obvious choice for the figure of the Leviathan. He is a relatively high-ranking member of their local community. He killed Hobbes. A dog, an animal, could arguably represent the wilderness, which, naturally, is directly connected to the state of nature.
Julius’ retributive violence characterises his potential as the Leviathan. He responds to Troy’s violence by punishing everyone. 

Troy is perhaps a pretender Leviathan without the strength to embody the role, concerned with his petty rivalries to an ex lover.

“I was tired of Claire talking about you; she had mentioned your name twice in four years, and so I had to see what was going on.”

This is not a man you can respect. If he’d been shot, nothing would have been lost from this fictional community. Better to replace him with a more effective unit.

Hobbes himself would argue, if we consider Troy to be the Leviathan, that Julius should simply submit. Can we ultimately view Julius’ sparing of this insufficient man as carrying through on the idea that, even if the Sovereign is insufficient that they should be left in place anyway in order to preserve society from the state of nature?

Hobbes is an animal, therefore thematically closer to the state of nature. It is notable that the chaos is evoked at the point in which Hobbes is killed, which could parallel the decline of society back into a state of nature characterised by fear and violence, in the absence of the Leviathan. This could further be paralleled to the English Civil War, which resulted from conflicts between parliament and Charles I over power.

Julius becomes a threat to the social contract and civilisation, possibly embodying the war of all against all, wherein nobody is safe. But the shooting of Hobbes ties into the social contract by sowing the seeds of that threat to civilised society. To shoot the dog could be seen as a breaking of the social contract which the Leviathan must punish in order to deter further threats to social cohesion.

Alternatively, you could reverse the roles – with Troy’s murdering of Hobbes as the crime against civilisation, from whence all the chaos comes, that is then punished by Julius-as-Leviathan. Although mass murder is a tad overboard.

You might, if you squint, think of Hobbes as civilisation. If the Leviathan is that which holds civilisation together and stops it from collapsing back into a state of nature, then the fact that Julius goes on a rampage after the death of Hobbes might stand in for the subjects reverting to a war of all against all in the absence of a sovereign.

Troy is inherently connected to civilisation. Can we read his shooting of Hobbes as an attempt by civilisation to conquer the state of nature? Julius in turn could be thought of as ‘a righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent’ against the overreach of civilisation and the Leviathan.

And then there is Claire. Arguably, the most directly civilising presence in the book. She wanders into the woods, finds a mountain man, and through the power of pussy, connects him to civilisation. She might also stand in for the subjects – a relatively passive force that is feuded over between the sovereign and the state of nature.

You metaphorically kill the guy who proposes the need for the Leviathan and the idea of the state of nature and how all of this connects to a social contract which keeps everyone playing nicely together.

“Time makes dogs of us all”, says Mr. Winsome. Killing Hobbes seems to be the breaking of the social contract here. Actually, society doesn’t care about the social contract. When Julius appeals to civilisation for information about Hobbes’ killer, via the means of posters, he returns to find people are either indifferent, concerned with other issues, or overtly inimical. Eventually he gives up and from there on, it’s Julius vs Maine, in a sad conflict that will determine who can win… some.

Sorry.

Hobbes keeps Julius sane. Sort of a toxic relationship – the original guy was not a philosopher you’d want to shack up with. Kind of grim. He was a protestant, but perhaps had enough exposure to puritan modes of thinking to really weed out all of the joy in life. Joy, as you well know, leads to sin. So, fuck your neighbour. Or, er, don’t because orgasm leads to smiling and smiling leads to damnation. Anyway…

It’s noteworthy that, far from going mad on his own in his log cabin, Julius’ madness kicks in after he’s partially taken out of his state of existential wilderness by Claire, and Hobbes takes over the role of emotional support blanket once she’s gone off to knob the copper. In theory, Julius could have lived and died alone in his log cabin. The books also provide insulation – this explicitly stated. We can probably read another Aesop in there, if so inclined. Some kind of ‘don’t read the people away in a fortress of pages’ thing. A little trite, perhaps, but I’m biased.

But warmth becomes a bit like heroin. Just as Julius burns wood for warmth against the frigid temperatures, he has come to rely on others – first on Claire and then on Hobbes – for emotional warmth. When that’s taken away from him, the shakes kick in. If we wanted to stretch this metaphor well past breaking point, we could compare the Enfield to krokodil. But let’s not…

Troy is a somewhat pitiful man, puffing himself up. He seems to have killed Julius’ dog because Claire mentioned Julius to Troy once or twice. This is not a good reason to kill someone else’s dog. Does killing a dog justify Julius’ killing spree? No, but it does give him casus belli against Troy, so he does have the right to kill Troy, at least. Using other humans seemingly as bait, or just thinning the number of meat shields, to draw out the real killer is ethically debatable – but you can’t argue with the results.

You could argue that the responsibility for the deaths that occur in the book is not Julius’ alone, but also Troy’s. He, without reason or purpose, took the actions to trigger the cause of Julius’ war. It’s no accident that Julius is using a World War I battlefield rifle: The notion of civilian casualties and war crimes are a very recent invention. While the notion of war crimes did exist before the end of WWI, it was the Great War that brought the concept into broader consensus. It was then the Nurnberg trials following WWII that provide the basis for our contemporary understanding of war crimes.

Which is to point out that the weapon with which Julius fights his war is older than the modern concept of what a war is, and which rules apply and how. This reflects how Julius’ seeming view that civilians and combatants are interchangeable. This in turn reflects the idea that war is not concerned with modern civilisation’s ideals concerning who is and who is not an acceptable target. It in turn suggests that the very attempt to place a civilised veneer on war is misguided because the very attempt to do so betrays a certain naivete on part of the modern conception of war. Ultimately the idea that war is beholden to rules and agreed upon notions of justice is only applicable so long as the parties adhering to said notions can enforce them. As soon as this is no longer the case, it is possible that we revert to a state in which the distinction between combatant and non-combatant is somewhat less ironclad.

Ultimately, if one murders the loved ones of another, then that action triggers a reaction. This supersedes concepts of social position or authority. It is merely a matter of action and consequence. One does not roll a stone from the top of a hill and expect it to halt halfway down.

Troy represents a wilful naivete, taken on deliberately as part of an ego-defensive mechanism. A refusal to accept a foundational reality of life and a world in which, despite our context-dependent hierarchies, we are merely the same meat and blood as everything else, and none of the trappings of civilisation can save us from consequence.

From beggars to billionaires, none are exempt from the law of ‘fuck around and find out’.

In declaring war on the state of nature, Troy is responsible for the deaths of innocents whom he sacrifices to save his own ego.

War becomes a thematic through line in the book. Julius’ father fought in the Second World War and was thereafter disgusted by violence. It is, however, him who teaches Julius to shoot and care for the battle rifle with which he wreaks his indiscriminate revenge. Julius’ grandfather fought in the Boer War, the Battle of the Somme, and others. So there’s a history of war in the family. A Battle Rifle is a tool of war. It uses specific ammunition. It is no accident that he is using a battlefield weapon as opposed to a more modern hunting rifle. So Julius has gone all Greek hero on us, and descended from a lineage of blokes who are good at unmaking other blokes with a weapon of narrative significance.

I’m reminded of Judge Holden’s famous sermon:

“God doesn’t lie.
No, said the Judge, he doesn’t. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in the stones and trees, the bones of things.
Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
Moral lore is an invention of mankind, for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.”

So, given all this state of nature and war, what do we make of the fact that Julius spares Troy? Perhaps you can view it as a reassertion of the state of civilisation, but curiously only through the willing cessation of the state of nature. An implied cycle? The allowance of the civilised world to return to Claire, or perhaps indirectly implied Claire’s influence on Julius. Or Julius recognising that killing Troy would damage Claire if he exacts revenge.

It’s not clear why Julius lets Troy live. Honestly, it’s difficult to see how Claire fits into my misguided attempt to map this book onto Hobbesian thematics, but the alternative seems to be that it’s difficult to interpret her as anything other than a ‘softening’ force of femininity on men. Carried to its logical conclusion, the book suggests that this ‘softening’ effect is what allows civilisation to continue. But I’m sort of loathe to read yet another masculine-feminine dynamic into this. It would be nice to read Claire as something other than just another Madonna figure. I’m a bit bored of ‘pussy makes men simmer down for a sec’ connotations. But either I don’t have the right reference point to connect to, or she really is there as a sort of metaphysical balm.

I guess I just find the potential symbolic narrative evoked by the male characters to be far more interesting and it would be a shame if the sole woman of the story wasn’t able to contribute to that in a meaningful way. Not that I think Donovan would have done so deliberately – sometimes a story just plays out like that.

Anyway, all this talk of a state of nature is questionable to say the least. There is no real hard link thematically, and Julius himself notes Hobbes’ name as being entirely random.

“We called the dog Hobbes, from a philosopher, the first name we found when we pulled a book at random from the shelf; so the luck of a draw got Hobbes his name.”

Although, I suppose the point of the Leviathan is that its violence is not responded to and the state is on its side, so making a serious attempt to map Hobbesian social contract theory onto Julius Winsome is an exercise in idiocy, but here I am… In addition, I’m stretching the idea of the state of nature past its breaking point – it’s highly dubious as to whether you can call one man running around the Maine woods doming blokes with an old battle rifle a state of nature, even metaphorically. It is less ‘all against all’ so much as it is ‘Julius against all.’

In the end, it’s not really clear why the dog is called Hobbes. Maybe Donovan meant something by it, despite Julius’ comment, but it’s questionable. If he didn’t, then we can chalk this up to a potentially vaguely interesting, but nonetheless wrongheaded, interpretation of the book on my part. If he did, then reasonable criticism could be levelled at the author for attempting to force a subtext that is bigger than the surface narrative into the book.

The stark prose fits the frozen lonely setting. It’s a very internally focussed book, with Julius’ interactions mainly taking place in his memory, and when they do occur in real time, they’re slightly awkward and halting. Difficult to know how to take this; whether it has any greater meanings beyond ‘bloke goes nuts in the woods’. I found some interesting lines of interrogation, but, honestly, I think the more I looked at them, the less stable they became. That’s fine – not everything has to be some multi-layered trifle of experience.

It is filled with brilliantly quotable parts. Not one liners, in the James Bond sense, but as the novel is sparse with chapters frequently only last two or three pages, Donovan shows a great aptitude for communicating a lot in a few words. 

A good one to read in the Autumn and Winter months.