Timothy Findley's slim, dense novel The Wars offers nothing short of an explanation of human violence. However alien or mad Findley's World War I events become, war itself is repeatedly depicted as damnably quotidian. A front-line nurse confesses, "the passions involved were as ordinary as me and my sister fighting over who's going to cook the dinner. And who won't." Bringing Dostoyevsky's moral palette to the trenches of the Great War, The Wars seems compelled to reveal how the same men who save one another's lives will also torture trench rats or stray cats for sport.