Sebastian Faulks’s latest book focuses on the most irreconcilable geopolitical struggle of our age, the Israel-Palestine conflict. While “the sound of mortar and machine gun, the collision of flesh and metal” are integral to Faulks’s best known works, such as Birdsong, in his 17th novel the military presence is a peacekeeping one. It’s 1946 and infantry officer Philip Deval, who saw action in Normandy, is deployed to the Holy Land to take part in maintaining Britain’s mandate in Palestine.
Initially Philip is second in command of a battalion overseeing febrile relationships between Jewish and Arab communities. Britain’s profound failures and manipulation in the region, and the imminence of its disastrous departure from the territory, come under scrutiny. While able to drum up motivation and cheer for the men in his battalions, privately Philip wrestles with inner melancholy.
He is “shrouded” in a “loneliness … that insulates him from the world”. Experiences on the battlefield and other, slowly elucidated tragedies have led to his pessimistic bent. Much of what Philip observes in the Middle East, and his “foreboding” sense of its intractable problems, only confirms his despairing sense of human nature.
It also underlines his ambivalence towards notions of divine benevolence. In Jerusalem, Philip and some of his men find themselves in a raucous bar. They jostle along among multicultural crowds, those “with yarmulkes, tarbushes … barehead Armenians and Greeks … [all] playing dice and cards in a mix of tongues”.
Philip knows that “soon they would [all] be killing each other … Humans had worked out the movements of the planets and prised apart the indivisible atom; they cured mysterious diseases and found a new way, by trade, of making themselves richer than the sum of their possessions … But a group of closely related people in a fertile landscape couldn’t find a way to coexist.” This inability to coexist does, indeed, frequently erupt into shocking violence and inevitable reprisals. Faulks captures these with his typically steady and unblinking attention, in scenes where both the seriousness of his research and his instinct for affecting fictive detail is clear. Not long after Philip’s arrival in the region, Zionist paramilitaries bomb the King David Hotel, location of the headquarters of the Palestine police and the British administration.
While helping to rescue survivors from the debris, “in a Remington [typewriter] that Philip lifted clear, there were three severed female fingers jammed between the keys”. Faulks’s plots often cultivate friendships formed in duress. Here, Matthew Kilvert, a priest attached to the peacekeeping mission, has a “genial energy”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
