Peacetime
Robert Edric Doubleday, 357pp, £12.99
ISBN 0385602979
This novel opens in the late summer of 1946. James Mercer, an army engineer, has been commissioned to destroy all the gun platforms positioned on the Wash of the Fenland coast. Having served in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, he believes that he can adapt to most situations. Although he encounters much hostility from the locals - in effect, he is dismantling their homes and livelihoods - he appears to take all of this in his stride.
Right from the beginning, we see the community through the eyes of this cool, efficient engineer. We experience his sense of isolation from his workers, from the local community and from himself. But we struggle to condemn him because, in this novel, the fate of anyone who reflects too much on the past is misery: Mathias, a German prisoner of war, is racked by guilt about the crimes committed by his country. His friend, Jacob, a Jewish glassmaker who lost his whole family in the Holocaust, is withering away from grief. Mercer listens with detachment to their stories and wonders about their friendship.
It takes his involvement with a local family that did not take part actively in the war to make him feel the true pain of the conflict. He befriends Mary, the 15-year-old daughter of Lynch, a soldier who has been imprisoned for four years for deserting before he was due to be shipped to North Africa. When Lynch returns home, Mercer finds his treasured neutrality tested to the limit when it becomes clear that the deserter is abusing his wife and daughter. He also harbours a deep hatred of Mercer.
Through painful experience, Mercer eventually realises that his original conception of himself was false: "He was no longer a mere observer, someone detached and apart . . . he was part of that storm, and, possibly, in all he was there to demolish and to build anew, its most potent and destructive current."
This is a novel of ambition and skill, at once a historical meditation, an evocation of a disintegrating society and, perhaps most strikingly, a family melodrama. In some ways, it resembles Melvyn Bragg's The Soldier's Return (1999), in that both fictions, set in remote parts of England, are about soldiers who return home and cause domestic havoc. But the tone is much bleaker. Perhaps a closer comparison is with Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room, which also explored the horrors of the postwar peace: their prose is spartan, they largely avoid period detail and their tone is sourly ironic. They are both concerned, too, with the ways in which individuals - Seiffert's photographer, Edric's engineer - are contaminated and compromised by a conflict with which they were not directly involved. Peacetime deserves the recognition that Seiffert's Booker-nominated debut received in 2001.
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