Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker review – unusual perspectives on warfare

When a British army captain loses his legs to an IED, his trauma and slow recovery are narrated by the objects around him in this stylistically ambitious debut from a former soldier

Harry Parker’s first novel begins just after British army captain Tom Barnes steps on an IED. The location is unspecified, but Parker’s own biography – an army officer, he lost both his legs to an IED in 2009 – suggests Afghanistan. Like Parker, Barnes loses one leg to the blast and one to infection, although that isn’t apparent right away since the book’s chapters jump back and forward in time, describing scenes from Barnes’s deployment, his lengthy and traumatic recuperation, and the lives of locals, including insurgents, whose paths he crosses. Parker has said he wanted it to be possible to read the book’s chapters “in any order, because that’s what it’s like to be blown up. I liked the idea of creating a puzzle with each chapter.”

Parker’s narrative might jump from the chaos of an Afghan firefight to a Sainsbury’s car park and back again, but it never feels all that puzzling: his prose, economical but evocative and at times wincingly graphic, confidently shepherds you through the ruptured timeline. What might cause puzzlement, however, is his decision to rotate the first-person narrative voice not between characters, but between objects involved in Captain Barnes’s story. The first three chapters, for example, are narrated by a tourniquet, a bag of fertiliser, and a boot. This is an interesting idea, and one that gives Parker freedom to shift his focus between characters and events in a way that might otherwise feel bizarrely staccato, but it also raises questions that impede the story. The more you wonder why body armour is more poetic than a running shoe, or why a detonating bomb favours alliteration, the less absorbed in the book you become.

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