Monty - His Part in My Victory

Spike Milligan Monty - His Part in My Victory (1976)
I needed something light after On the Road, and this was funny when I was fourteen - or whatever age I would have been when I first read it - so here I am again. Monty is part three of Milligan's memoir of the second world war, reading more like the second part of Rommel? Gunner Who? than a book by its own terms, accounting for just four relatively uneventful months of 1943 in what is a distinctly slender volume. Spike and his khaki pals spend most of Monty bumming around North Africa prior to their posting to Italy, as described in the fourth volume and requiring a much darker tone; so I guess the point of this volume was mostly to round things up and keep it all tidy. Most of this occurs on the periphery of the war so there's no combat, mostly just getting by in a foreign land, missing home, and so on. As with the previous volume, the story is told through a blend of text, hastily drawn cartoons, stock photos embellished with ludicrous captions, and sheer fantasy presumably capturing the spirit of Spike's experience better than would a more sober and rigidly autobiographical monologue.

The weirdest thing for me has been that it's essentially a much shorter, funnier On the Road, with consequence being something only ever occurring over the next hill and the same jazz obsession - although frankly I prefer Spike's wacky populist version to Kerouac's hipster cat bollocksarooni. Beyond a few admittedly solid chuckles, Monty doesn't really do a whole lot, but the modest page count doesn't allow time for boredom to set in so complaints would seem churlish; plus knowing what the next book has in store for the poor bastard, only a twat would have a problem with this volume.