In peril on the sea
The Redeemed By Tim Pears Bloomsbury £16.99
With The Redeemed, Tim Pears brings his remarkable and riveting West Country Trilogy to a satisfying end; even, unfashionably, a happy one.
The three novels are utterly compelling in their recapture of rural England before and after the First World War. In this last book, his treatment of the war itself is equally gripping. There is a brilliant account of the Battle of Jutland, as experienced by the young hero of the trilogy, Leo Sercombe.
In one sense, the story Pears tells is very simple and as old as the hills. Indeed, the publishers admit this on the cover of the new novel: ‘A Love Divided – A World Torn In Two – A Return’; or, alternatively and crudely, ‘boy meets girl, boy is torn from girl, boy seeks his way back to girl…’
Leo is the boy, a carter’s son, only 12 in The Horseman; and the girl is Lottie, whose father Lord Prideaux owns the estate from which Leo and his family were expelled. Leo has a marvellous affinity with horses. Lottie has no wish to be a fashionable lady; her ambition is to be a vet.
Recounting the story in any detail would be ridiculous in a short review. Leo’s share of it belongs to the genre called picaresque; though, unlike some classics of that genre, it’s not just one damned thing after another, for he will acquire self-knowledge through his experiences.
Lottie is rooted in the estate, apart from her studies at a veterinary college in London, though we learn more about her emotional life than about Leo’s. Pears may not weave a plot but he is a marvellous storyteller.
He is also admirably bold; and sufficiently self-confident to take enormous risks. Anyone who has read, admired and indeed loved The Horseman and The Wanderers, may be surprised, disappointed and even baffled to find Leo torn from the land in this novel, serving first as a boy seaman in the Royal Navy, and then, after the war, engaged as a diver in salvaging scuttled German ships in Scapa Flow.
These sections are vivid and persuasive; important also as stages in Leo’s education and his coming to self-knowledge. But, if you have given readers one sort of book, one distinct and seductive atmosphere, you risk losing them when you present them with something so completely different.
Pears gets away with this because he writes with such imagination, authority and mastery of detail, but I would guess that for some it may be a close-run thing, as they sigh for a return to rural England and even flick the pages impatiently.
I was angered by one review of The Horseman that spoke of its ‘pastoral schmaltz’. This was absurd. Certainly, in all three novels, there is beauty and charm in the evocation of the countryside and work on the land. But Pears is never sentimental. He shows that rural life was hard, demanding, exhausting and often cruel, and doesn’t shrink from harsh reality.
Treatment of animals was, by our standards, often brutal (though today’s brutality may take a different form). Yet there is also an understanding of them: a long scene in which Leo sets himself to tame a terrified and, therefore, vicious horse is beautifully done.
There is a rare ambition and daring to these novels. If, for much of the time, the story of Leo and Lottie is stalled and doesn’t apparently advance – and though one of the stalls is a tricksy moment of misunderstanding that is almost as blatant a narrative prod as any devised by Thomas Hardy – Pears has the courage to believe that his readers will follow him over hill and dale or down whichever apparently blind track he leads us.
We do so eagerly because, even if there is the occasional flat or congested passage, our interest is always maintained and we trust that on the next page or the one after, the magic will work again – as indeed it does, repeatedly and rewardingly.