In the Wolf’s Mouth
by Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
The chaos of conflict in North Africa and Sicily at the end of the Second World War haunts Adam Foulds’s third novel. Foulds, an award-winning poet and one of Granta’s “Best Young British Writers,” explores the two theatres of war through the experiences of a pair of young soldiers, Will Walker, an English Arabist attached to the Field Security Services, and Ray Marfione, an Italian-American infantryman from New York.
Ray is a diffident, self-effacing character, for whom warfare is both appalling and oddly liberating: “The army had taken him from the cramped, complicated, disorderly world of his Italian neighbourhood and introduced him to the rest of America”—and, beyond America, to a world of fragile, hazardous tenderness. For Will—clever, ambitious, a romantic despite himself (he takes a copy of The Wind in the Willows to war with him)—the human condition proves complex, cruel and obstinately resistant to his idealistic notions of amelioration.
Foulds’s narrative resonates with echoes of other writers: the Sicilian section of the novel is perfused with the distinctive flavour of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1958 masterpiece, The Leopard; while Will shares many traits and experiences with the late travel writer and novelist Norman Lewis, including his mastery of Arabic, the brown eyes that (apparently) disbar him from a commission and a commanding officer who declines into madness.
Yet the pellucid elegance of Foulds’s fictional voice is entirely his own. He conjures with exhilarating assurance the sense of a postwar collapse of order so complete as to be almost voluptuous.
by Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
The chaos of conflict in North Africa and Sicily at the end of the Second World War haunts Adam Foulds’s third novel. Foulds, an award-winning poet and one of Granta’s “Best Young British Writers,” explores the two theatres of war through the experiences of a pair of young soldiers, Will Walker, an English Arabist attached to the Field Security Services, and Ray Marfione, an Italian-American infantryman from New York.
Ray is a diffident, self-effacing character, for whom warfare is both appalling and oddly liberating: “The army had taken him from the cramped, complicated, disorderly world of his Italian neighbourhood and introduced him to the rest of America”—and, beyond America, to a world of fragile, hazardous tenderness. For Will—clever, ambitious, a romantic despite himself (he takes a copy of The Wind in the Willows to war with him)—the human condition proves complex, cruel and obstinately resistant to his idealistic notions of amelioration.
Foulds’s narrative resonates with echoes of other writers: the Sicilian section of the novel is perfused with the distinctive flavour of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1958 masterpiece, The Leopard; while Will shares many traits and experiences with the late travel writer and novelist Norman Lewis, including his mastery of Arabic, the brown eyes that (apparently) disbar him from a commission and a commanding officer who declines into madness.
Yet the pellucid elegance of Foulds’s fictional voice is entirely his own. He conjures with exhilarating assurance the sense of a postwar collapse of order so complete as to be almost voluptuous.
