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Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
by Jim Paul
Harcourt Brace (Harvest) 1991, 256 pages (paper).
What do you get when you take a 2.5-billion-year-old piece of quartzite
and two guys who like to throw rocks into the water, and then add a $500
grant from a California arts center? Well, if the guys in question are San
Francisco-based author Jim Paul and his mechanical-genius buddy Harry, you
get Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon.
A friend of mine who has read most of my book reviews has complained
about my supposed over-use of the word "fun," so I regret to report that
the despised term applies to this book, too. There's just no way around it;
Catapult is a very witty, entertaining, humorous book,
and to my way of thinking, that equates to fun. Perhaps I may be pardoned
because the author himself admits (to himself and his readers, if not to
the staff of the Headlands Center for the Arts) that fun was his main motivation
in building a working catapult and using it to fire rocks off the cliffs
of the Headlands.
Yes, you read correctly. Jim and Harry actually build and fire a catapult,
then give a public presentation about the experience. And although Harry
will strenuously deny it later, both he and Jim obviously do have fun
resurrecting an extinct siege engine. Perhaps the chief source of humor in
this book is the competitve, argumentative, archetypically male
friendship of Jim and Harry, as illuminated by the demands of their
unusual project: His imagination fired by an airline employee's characterization
of his chunk of quartzite as a "weapon," Jim decides it would be
"fun" to build a catapult. For this endeavor, writer Jim (who lists a paragraph
and a sandwich as things he has "made" recently) needs the help of the handy
but reluctant Harry. The wily author secures Harry's assistance by
maneuvering his friend into betting that Jim can't get a
grant to build a working stone-thrower--but Jim can and does, so Harry's
in. Later on, when the partners need to cut an I-beam into sections
to serve as mounts for their catapult springs, Harry takes great glee
in scaring Jim by talking about the dangers of using an acetylene torch.
Naturally, the more Harry gloats and the more impatient he becomes with his
friend's amateurish attempts at tool use, the more determined Jim becomes
to do his part without help. Harry is a character of considerable comedic
potential in and of himself, quite apart from his interactions with Jim.
The topic of Harry's very Americanized take on the practice of kyudo,
the Japanese art of Zen archery, ranks among the brightest of the
book's many comic gems.
Someone--Groucho Marx, perhaps?--once said that watching the antics
of an eccentric is not nearly as funny as watching someone else react to
those antics. This "observer" principle comes into play often in Catapult
in the form of the reactions of third parties to Jim and Harry's
project. These reactions run the gamut from the growing annoyance
of Jim's girlfriend and Harry's wife, to the blandness of Jim's seen-it-all
accountant (for whom the matter is simple: Jim's an author, so if he's writing
about building a catapult, the costs are tax deductible), to the surprising
enthusiasm of a female park ranger who observes Jim and Harry firing their
siege engine. Often Jim has the uncomfortable feeling that he and Harry are
being humored, and of course he's often right.
Opponents of literary levity will no doubt be gratified to learn that
not everything in Catapult is fun. For example, the pain of
the author's unhappy relationship with his father is evident. Moreover, as
the book progresses, a sense that there is something sinister about the catapult
project becomes increasingly plain, despite the author's continued fine use
of humor. Jim Paul has deftly interwoven chapters on the history of projectile
weapons with his account of his experiences. (In fact, when I looked for
this book in a large chain store, I was surprised to find it shelved, not
under Literature, but under Military History.) One of these chapters, "The
Warwolf," recounts the strange and chilling story of how King Edward I of
England succumbed to the cruel fascination radiated by an enormous trebuchet
constructed for his war against the Scots, and allowed that fascination to
lead him to commit what we would now term a war crime. Even more unsettling
is the chapter entitled "The Destruction of the Second Temple," concerning
Rome's conquest of Jerusalem. Jim Paul's scathing account of the Roman atrocities
and his excoriation of Josephus, Jewish historian and Roman collaborator,
are marked by a vehemence I have come to associate with denunciations of
Hitler and the Nazis. By this point in the story, the book's subtext--the
terrible fascination weapons exert on the human imagination--has become
unmistakable. Though Jim and Harry's catapult is used for nothing truly violent,
it is clear that the impulse to build it springs from something darker than
the simple fun of throwing rocks into the water.
Nonetheless, I would be doing Catapult a disservice
to end my review on this grim note, because the book itself does not end
this way. Moreover, I have yet to mention the wonderful turns of phrase Jim
Paul scatters with indiscriminate generousity throughout his work: whether
he is describing the way a steel leaf spring "screamed and flung a furious
fan of sparks over Harry's feet" under the wheel of a chop-saw or the "mental
squirm" that accompanies writing a check you fear you may not be able to
cover, he never fails to conjure up marvelous images in the reader's mind.
Always fascinating, by turns frightening and fun--yes, fun--Catapult
is a reading experience not to be missed.
Edited August 23, 1998
Copyright ©1998 by Steven R. Solomon. All rights reserved.
Book Review
by Steve Solomon
Please send comments to
srsgm@pacbell.net.