Book Review: Saving Private Ryan by Max Allan Collins

 

Published: July 30, 1998.

SPOILERS AHEAD

It’s rare that a novelisation from the script of a movie – an early script, too, given the appearance of a half-dozen scenes that didn’t make the final cut of the Steven Spielberg-helmed epic – comes even remotely close to being as good as the film, but Max Allan Collins’ treatment of the Robert Rodat script is brilliant.

Like the movie, Saving Private Ryan begins with a modern-day prologue (later revealed to be the surviving James Ryan in a Normandy graveyard) and switches to the bloodbath that was the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. Collins’ depiction of the carnage springs off the page like Bernard Cornwell’s battle scenes in the Sharpe novels. It’s gripping, bloody, obviously very well researched, and very hard to put down.

After the Omaha beachhead is secured, Captain Miller and a squad of mostly-inexperienced men from the 2^nd Ranger Battalion, are sent inland to find Private James Ryan, a member of the 10st airborne division, and bring him back to the coast. Miller’s men are working under orders from George Marshall, chief of staff of the US Army, because three of Ryan’s brothers have been killed – one on Omaha Beach, another on Utah Beach and one in the Pacific – and the Army, conscious of a PR nightmare, want to get the sole surviving brother out of harm’s way, and back to his family in Iowa.

The good thing about novels is that they can flesh out characters far more than movies can or do, so we learn plenty about Captain Miller, Sergeant Horvath, Privates Jackson, Mellish, Caparzo and Reiben, the medic, Wade, and translator Upham. The narrative is far more brutal than in the movie, with lots more swearing, and some great humorous scenes involving the wise-ass Reiben. Impressively, all of the characters get their moment to shine, and Collins takes the reader inside the heads of the squad, men who are struggling with the idea of their mission: potentially sacrificing eight or nine men to save one.

Although the circumstances of the mission are made up, the script and novel obviously drew some inspiration from the Niland brothers, four men from Towanda, New York, who fought in the Second World War. At the end of hostilities, it was initially thought that just one brother survived, but a second was found alive in a POW camp in Burma.

Captain Miller’s squad finds Private Ryan with a group of other paratroopers from the 101^st Airborne Division, and Ryan refuses to leave, at least not until he has fought with his comrades at Ramelle, a fictional battle inland from Normandy, but certainly one based on real events, with lightly-armed paratroopers scrambling to stop German armour from rolling over bridges and pushing towards the invasion zone. Like the opening scenes on Omaha Beach, the climactic battle literally jumps off the page at you.

My Verdict: Yes, Collins had a good script to work from, but it’s not always a guarantee that a good script makes a good novelisation. The author still has a lot of work to do, and Collins does it brilliantly here. It’ll make you want to pull out the DVD and revisit the film, too. Five stars out of five.