Who is Robert Radcliffe? And why are so many serious-minded authors - Michael Holroyd, John Bayley, Kate Atkinson - offering such lavish pre-publication praise for what is, after all, nothing more than an adventure story written with money-making in mind. The inside flap of the dust jacket offers a clue. "Robert Radcliffe", we are told, is a pseudonym. So who, one wonders, is he, or indeed she? No doubt someone with friends in high places.
Under an English Heaven is the romantic story of an American bomber crew and their English neighbours in an East Anglian village next to the airbase. As such, it conforms to every cliche of the genre. First up is the sensitive, traumatised Lieutenant John Hooper, the sole survivor from a disastrous mission. There is the equally unstable rookie crew he is brought in to command. The odds of this bunch of washed-up misfits ever completing their tour are virtually zilch.
In Bedenham, the quintessential war-time village, the stereotyping continues. Billy Street is the teenage evacuee guttersnipe from London, whose dodging and diving adds to the sense of unease felt by his carers, Ray and Maggie, humble country types who are already suspicious about the proximity of the oversexed, overpaid American airmen. Ray is the village blacksmith, as his father was before him, and he feels that the security of his old familiar world is under severe threat. Finally, there is Heather Garrett, a pretty young schoolteacher (what else would she be?) of independent spirit with a husband missing in the far east. Inevitably, she and Hooper provide the romantic thread. But this is all right, because Heather married her husband after a whirlwind courtship, during which she never got to know him properly (it was wartime, you see), and so we can forgive her adultery.
Radcliffe overuses the trick of starting a chapter by telling you what has happened, and then spending the next 15 pages or so recounting it retrospectively. But his book, though written to formula, is a rattling good yarn, the literary version of a Hollywood period blockbuster. The action sequences, in particular, are not only gripping, but provide an authentic sense of how terrifying it must have been to be at the controls of a Flying Fortress (a misnomer, if ever there was one) over Nazi-occupied Germany in broad daylight, and before there was sufficient fighter protection.
I don't think it's giving too much away to say that the crew come good, but that there is real tension as their missions mount and the odds against their survival lengthen further. With a clear eye on the American market, not to say movie options, Under an English Heaven has all the drama, action and romance you could possibly want. None the less, it's hard to take anyone seriously who writes of "iron-shod hooves ringing on the cobbles" or "cattle lowing in the sheds" in the same sentence. Birdsong of the skies it ain't.
James Holland is working on a book about the siege of Malta
