To begin to understand the brutality of the Great War, or the senselessness of it, is beyond the grasp of most. To write a novel that can hope to come to grips with the scale of the issues involved will cause any writer, especially a first-time writer, to reach into his depths. Thus the task set himself by Joseph Morrow, the protagonist of Adam Thorpe's ambitious and intense novel.
Joseph travels to Flanders in 1921 on a package-tour that which will takes in the battlefields. Gangs of Chinese coolies are clearing mines; local prostitutes, wearing shell pieces for earrings, cash in on the influx of curious and bereaved tourists. Joseph becomes romantically entangled with Tillie, a pretty English girl who dresses in cream, and Marda, a dark and brooding but sensuous German widow. Returning to a cottage in the Chilterns, to a society where on a good day people say, "a right shame to be dead", rather than "good to be alive", Joseph weaves his way through his ongoing romantic attachments as he struggles to find the tiny window through which his artistic soul can fly and make sense of the war.
The layering of symbol in this fiercely concentrated novel is at times overpowering; but then anything less in a novel about WW1the first World War would be wanting. Thorpe's description of Joseph's drunken wanderings around the trenches are powerful, especially in the unexpected, almost throwaway, passages: "(He)... felt men were watching him, crouched there in rows with turned-up eyes. They had never left, they were still waiting for the off, turned towards him with unseeing eyes as white as crocus bulbs."
The banality of war - sudden death side by side with boredom - recalls Francis Stuart at his best, writing of a later war. This is a memorable journey in the name of art, into hell and out the other side.
Peter Cunningham is a ovelist and critic