The Soldier's Return
Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction
Small people caught up in large events can be great characters for a novel. I think this is the fourth or fifth World War II novel I’ve posted about--not a theme I expected to see running through my blog entries, but there’s something about that combination of intimate, personal stories and the inexorable sweep of historic events that makes for great reading. So here’s another novel I can’t resist telling you about.
Melvyn Bragg’s The Soldier’s Return is actually about the aftermath of the war, as you may guess from the title. It’s a quiet but heartbreaking novel about a soldier’s difficulty in readjusting to life back home in a northern English town.
Sam Richardson served in Burma and saw things there that he could never have imagined when he was growing up in the little Cumbrian town of Wigton. His overwhelming happiness at being reunited with his wife, Ellen (a local girl with even stronger ties to Wigton than his own), and his young son is tempered by those service memories, which he can never share.
The reunion is complicated further by mutual jealousy between Sam and his son (neither of whom is used to sharing Ellen), by Ellen’s reluctance to give up the independence she earned in her husband’s absence, and by the hardships of housing and employment in postwar England.
No longer sure he fits in his old hometown and miserably unhappy at the misunderstandings between him and Ellen, Sam hopes for a fresh start in Australia. But Ellen’s whole self has been shaped by her role in their little town’s life, and she can’t bear to leave. The family may be torn apart.
This is a subtle, sympathetic portrait of unassuming people whose lives are altered by the great forces of international events. The characters are beautifully and convincingly drawn.
The book is also a lovingly evocative portrait of a lost time and place—England in the last days of a sort of provincial innocence, when everyone in town knew everyone else, and the course of life was set almost from birth.
There are two sequels now to The Soldier’s Return, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines.
