Despite the occasional foray into “tribute literature” (and it’s not every writer who would risk his karaoke skills on James Bond and Bertie Wooster), Sebastian Faulks is probably still best known in search-optimisation circles for France, war, romance and mental illness.
His enjoyable if uneven 13th novel – reaching back through various points of the last century – sees him once more among those elements. Much of it is terrifyingly to the point. The passages set in the trenches of Anzio in 1944 are as compelling and alive as anything he has written since Birdsong, his huge-selling 1993 novel about British tunnel-diggers at the Somme. The intricacies of war suit Faulks’s love of research and his mastery of it – how to layer and find ornament in it, what German tanks to mention, what level of ignorance to assume on the part of his reader. And there’s something about the everyday nearness of men being ripped apart by flying metal that raises Faulks’s officer-class prose to its sharpest pitch.
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