A Son of War
Melvyn Bragg Sceptre, 426pp, £16.99
ISBN 0340734159
Why are sequels nearly always vastly inferior to their predecessors? Melvyn Bragg's new novel is a good case in point. It is the sequel to A Soldier's Return, which deservedly won the 1999 W H Smith Literary Award and earned Bragg rapturous accolades from critics and the public alike. It told the story of Sam Richardson, a soldier who saw all kinds of horrors when he fought in Burma in the Second World War.
Bragg focused exclusively on Sam's return to his working-class home in Wigton, Cumbria, and wove a compelling tale about Sam's family and situation, his long-suffering wife, Ellen, his young child, Joe, his judgemental in-laws and the lack of opportunities or hope in Wigton. At the crux of the novel was the moral dilemma that Sam constructed for himself: should he stay in Wigton with his family - whom he knows he is abusing - or should he leave it all behind and find a new life in Australia?
Bragg's telling of this simple tale was masterful; he used the third person to great effect, leaping from the traumatised mind of Sam to the confused and increasingly fearful thoughts of his wife, to the bewilderment and terror of his small son. When I spoke to Bragg about the novel, it was clear that it was the most personal and important story he had ever written. It was loosely based on events in his own life: like Joe, he grew up in Wigton and had a father who returned from the war. Bragg felt that there was even a sense in which he was a bit like a soldier himself when he returned to Wigton, which he does often. The combination of Bragg's spare, clean prose, his meticulous research, his personal knowledge of the subject and a gripping moral dilemma made the novel an important work of art.
I was greatly looking forward to reading A Son of War, but soon found myself disappointed. I quickly realised why. The narrative was too familiar to me and the situation in the novel was much less dramatic. Bragg tries perfunctorily to resurrect the dilemmas of the previous novel: should Ellen try to protect Joe from Sam's attempts to "make a man" of him; should Sam go to Australia or not? But the reader already knows the answers to these questions if he has read the first novel and, if he isn't familiar with The Soldier's Return, Bragg conveniently summarises the main points in the first chapters of A Son of War. The resulting narrative is much more like soap opera than the finely crafted fiction of its predecessor.
Sam works as a shiftworker at a local factory, moves his family out to a half-constructed council estate, and then decides to become a pub landlord. He continues to fight for the affection of his son; he teaches him how to box and how to stick up for himself in a fight. He worries that his wife will turn the boy soft by encouraging him to take piano and tap-dancing lessons. The most interesting sections of the book are at the end, when Bragg evokes the adolescent trials of Joe. The agony of his jealousies, his frustrated desires, his class envy and his conflicting emotions towards his parents are brilliantly drawn, and bring real energy to a book that is too leisurely for its own good.
If Bragg wanted to make this sequel as compelling as A Soldier's Return, he should have abandoned the very technique that made the book such a success - the third-person narration. This book should have been narrated by Joe. When Bragg spoke to me, he said, rather ruefully, that he knew A Soldier's Return was an old-fashioned book because of its omniscient narration, and he knew fashionable metropolitan writers such as Nick Hornby always wrote in the first person. However, it is a question not of fashion, but of being willing to make a departure. The sequel is inferior because the predecessor's shadow is too great. If Bragg had been able to forget about A Soldier's Return, he might have written a better novel.
Francis Gilbert is a writer and teacher
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