Graeme Lay

This novel opens with the oft-quoted line: ‘‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’’. Elderly Leo Colson finds a diary he kept during the summer of 1900, recording events from his boyhood which he has suppressed for years, when he stayed on a Norfolk estate with the upper-class family of a boarding school chum, Marcus. Leo is pressured by Marcus’ beautiful sister, Marion, to take messages to her secret lover, tenant farmer Ted Burgess, a go-between role which has devastating consequences. Set in 1867 at Lyme Bay, on England’s southwest coast, this novel is based on the affair between an independentminded governess, Sarah Woodruff, and an amateur naturalist, Charles The year is 1934. An aspiring young poet and amateur violinist walks away from his Cotswold village and makes his way first to London, then to Spain. He traverses the country on foot, sleeping rough, living on cheese, fruit, dried fish and wine, busking with his violin to earn a few pesos. Richly poetic, Lee’s writing is full of enviable metaphors. ‘‘Valladolid is a dark square city as hard as its syllables’’. Eventually he reaches the south of Spain, where political upheavals force him to flee the country. Guy Crouchback, heir to an aristocratic English Roman Catholic family in decline, is determined to enter World War II.

He joins the army and trains as an officer with the fictional Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Crouchback’s first campaign involves a farcical encounter in West Africa which lands him in strife with the authorities. Told in Waugh’s characteristically beautiful, bitingly satirical prose, the novel exposes both the absurdity of the military and the futility of war.

The first of a trilogy – the others are Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender – the novels comprise the finest works of fiction to emerge from World War II.