From the trenches to the Rising

FICTION: The Soldier's SongBy Alan Monaghan Macmillan, 298pp. £11.99

IT'S A brave writer who chooses as his territory the blood-sodden trenches of the Great War. Quite aside from the Remarques and Hemingways of the immediate post-war period, in more recent years several important novels have revisited its horrors, all deserving of their claim to a place in the canon of first World War literature – Pat Barker's Regenerationtrilogy, for instance, and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong.

However, it is Sebastian Barry and his novel A Long Long Way that springs most readily to mind when reading Alan Monaghan's fine debut, The Soldier's Song.

Not only does this ambitious novel, like Barry’s, follow the fate of a young Irish man serving in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, but more importantly, both books seek to explore the moral maze in which their protagonists find themselves as they fight for king and country while the Easter Rising and its aftermath rage on at home.

The central character in The Soldier's Songis Stephen Ryan, a gifted mathematics scholar at Trinity College, living with his sick father and disillusioned younger brother in a Dublin tenement.

As the novel opens in the summer of 1914, Ryan is on his way to the lavish party of a wealthy friend – a memorable scene that Monaghan evocatively describes – where the social divisions between him and his fellow students are starkly exposed, and his status as an outsider firmly established. Familiar as this narrative device has become (it turns up in everything from Jane Eyreto Pretty in Pink), it provides Monaghan with a springboard from which to explore his protagonist's character and choices – why he would volunteer to join the king's army, for one – but it also underscores the political and class contradictions that will arise later in the book and opens the way to questions of loyalty and identity.

LEAVING BEHIND TRINITY, and a nascent friendship with the equally gifted and non-conforming Lillian Bryce, Ryan is sent to training camp in the Curragh, and from there to Turkey, where his naive illusions about the "adventure" of war are irrevocably shattered on the battlefields of the Dardanelles.

The story takes another turn when, on leave from the front, he ends up in the midst of the Easter Rising, having to make a terrible choice when he learns that his brother is among the rebels attacking Dublin Castle.

On his return to France and, later, the bloodbath of Ypres, Ryan witnesses yet more atrocities, eventually finding himself pushed to the edges of sanity. As in scores of other first World War novels, the trenches provide rich material for the book’s most powerful passages, allowing the author to create a waking nightmare of memorable images: a marble-pale, lifeless hand protruding from a collapsed tunnel, or the grotesque split skull of a wounded comrade.

The three-part structure is also punctuated by passages from Ryan’s diary and letters to and from home, lending the story a further narrative layer.

Monaghan is an engaging writer – he won the 2002 Hennessy New Irish Writer award for the short story upon which The Soldier's Songis based – and this is a well-paced and immensely readable novel.

He has an instinctive understanding of where to end one chapter and pick up the next – which is a good thing, as the story covers a lot of ground.

Where he occasionally falls down is on voice – the dialogue is at times clunky, in particular the exchanges between Ryan and his best friend Billy, a bon vivant junior barrister of a type so familiar as to be a cliché (albeit a likeable one).

Similarly, Lillian is at times in danger of becoming somewhat two-dimensional in the role of constant sweetheart-in-waiting, but when Monaghan delves deeper into her story, he reveals a more rounded character, ripe for further development.

And indeed, there is still time for this: the book is the first instalment of a planned trilogy and it doeshave the feel of a first act. It marks out Monaghan as writer of promise, and on the strength of its storytelling and elegantly pitched ending, The Soldier's Songshould leave his readers eager for act two to begin.

Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to the Gloss magazine