Kaleidoscope of characters still stuck under war’s malign influence

Second part of de Bernieres’ trilogy tackles fallout from bereaved couple’s return to Britain in early 1920s

TRUE love has rarely run smoothly for Daniel Pitt and Rosie McCosh. In The Dust That Falls from Dreams, the first part of a projected trilogy by Louis de Bernieres, McCosh had grieved, for many years, the death in wartime of her intended, a young man named Ashbridge Pendennis, a friend since childhood.

It took the increasingly religious McCosh an eternity to accept what had happened and to learn to love Pitt, another childhood friend who had, unlike Ash, survived the Great War and moreover had made a name for himself as a flying ace.

They married, had a child and moved from England to Ceylon, to make a fresh start.

But in Ceylon McCosh gave birth to a stillborn, deformed baby. “Then dorasani Rosie gave birth to a monster which had all its guts on the outside, and after that nothing was the same,” Samadara, a Tamil girl who is part of the Pitts’ domestic staff, observes early in the sequel, So Much Life Left Over.

“She became very quiet and ... her servants said she spent a lot of time praying and was becoming a holy woman who was disconnected from the world.”

Though a second, healthy child was subsequently born, a gulf grows between the couple; she longs to return home, he wants to stay. In the event, they return to England, to her adored, clever Scottish father and her intolerably snobbish mother.

The fallout of this return and its impact on their relationship form much of the spine of this book but, as was the case with its (considerably longer) predecessor three years ago, de Bernieres achieves a kaleidoscopic effect in his narrative by means of brief chapters about, or voiced by, other characters: Rosie’s sisters Ottilie, Christabel (who lives with a bewitchingly green-eyed female artist named Gaskell) and Sophie; Oily Wragge, a skilled mechanic and gardener who works for the McCoshes; and the beautiful, slender Samadara herself, the reason for whose presence swiftly becomes clear.

It says much for de Bernières’ skill that such steady intercutting between different people does not hinder the flow of the narrative or even undermine the book’s structure.

So Much Life Left Over opens in early 1920s Ceylon, with Pitt and his friend Hugh Bassett idling away their time. Both, writes de Bernières, “suffered from the accidie of not being at war”.

Though neither quite missed the killing, “they missed the extremes of experience that had made them feel intensely alive during the Great War, in spite of its penumbra of death”.

THE war continues to exert its malign influence. Wragge, who had been a sergeant major during the conflict, is particularly affected, attempting, writes de Bernieres, “slowly and deliberately to come to terms with his war in Mesopotamia and his enslavement in Anatolia, by sorting his memories into the least painful order”.

His ordeal had included an astoundingly long and brutal death march.

Rosie cannot forget the screams of the injured and dying soldiers she encountered as a wartime nurse.

Pitt is forever casting his mind back to the carnage he wreaked and witnessed. The memory of those pilots, Allied or German, who burned to death will never leave him.