In Colours of War Cohen has attempted to deal, in too short a space, with too many serious issues. Of the various questions—philosophical, historical, political, religious, familial and sexual—which the novel raises, none receives consistently effective treatment; the questions themselves are not trivial or uninteresting, but they require more sustained and careful consideration than Cohen has chosen to give them. Such consideration is certainly not encouraged by the form of the book, which is an uneasy blend of realism and fantasy, narrated by a young man whose observations are an unpredictable combination of superficiality and insight…. No doubt Cohen intended that his narrator's difficulties and confusions, together with the novel's disconcerting mixture of the mundane and the surreal, would work to engage the reader more directly with the materials of the story and prevent the kinds of stock responses customarily made to political fiction. But the...