Oh Jesus, I thought, another one about the sodding First World War. The usual insincerity: solemn invocations of duty and sacrifice at monstrous scale, pitched with sufficient abstraction that one can also indulge without jarring guilt one’s war-game thrill in the movements of units and the flux of battle and so on.
This turned out to be somewhat unfair. The book has two parallel tracks. Present day: a monk, Anselm, digs into the wartime past of his beloved, deceased mentor Herbert, in order to work out why a weeping old man came looking for him. Attention focuses on a court martial in which Herbert participated. 1917: mostly accompanying Herbert, we see the events leading up to the court martial, the trial itself, and its consequences, both for the condemned and the condemning.
Because there’s this 1917 track, and because it concentrates closely on one person’s perspective, and because it’s done well, there’s none of the abstraction that allows one to find the war stuff exciting. It’s properly, concretely horrible: grim trenches, traumatic wounds, pointless discipline. That’s been done well often enough, of course, but no harm in doing it well again.
Meanwhile, the present day track avoids that abstraction because it’s still concentrating closely on one case. It’s effectively a bureaucratic mystery: lots of digging in files, reading between lines, tracing ancestries. The usual risk of this two-track approach is that one track makes the other redundant: we would learn who came looking for Herbert, or who exactly it was who got shot, or why the file is missing a death certificate, and then we would learn it all over again from another perspective. But here, in fact, the various puzzles are nicely, if someone artificially, held in balance; each track adds bits of information to the other, incrementally. It’s neat.
The one thing that really mars the book is its frequent attempts to move into a register of profundity. There’s a lot of profound stuff around, of course: the war has deep effects, it shakes the selves of its participants. But there’s also a lot of god stuff, as Herbert finds a vocation as monk, and as Anselm recounts how Herbert later helped him find the same. And there’s also the quasi-mystical connection that the condemned soldier, Flanagan, has with the soil and sea of his Irish home. All this means that characters, most especially Herbert, are having deep thoughts and epiphanies and revelations all over the place: hearing birdsong, seeing explosions, listening to people speak Gaelic, prompts for profundity abound.
The trouble with this is that listening to descriptions of other people’s epiphanies and such can often be a lot like listening to descriptions of their dreams or acid trips. To be fair, it does occasion some fine writing at times here, but you can only go into that register a couple of times in a book, I think, and here it’s done far too much. An example:
“Reluctantly, fearfully, Herbert began the journey inward, the voyage that cannot be put into words, but only lived. And he made another discovery: a richness of existence, intrinsic to his identity and true for all humanity, whose depth was beyond the reach of any calamity”.
Decent enough in itself, that, but you really don’t want as much of this stuff as you get in this otherwise very good novel.