Combining as it does the cultural narrative of a complex century forsaken by God and certainty, a serious investigation of the vulnerability of the human mind and an old-fashioned – in the best sense – story of love and war, this is an ambitious, demanding and profoundly melancholy novel.
Alas, the only sections with any vigor or narrative substance are those concerning Hendricks’s war and his one true, though broken, romance. The rest of the novel is an unmeshed assemblage of case histories, accounts of Hendricks’s psychiatric practice, expositions of his theories: his own and those of Dr. Pereira.
Planting clues and dangling red herrings as though he were writing a murder mystery, Faulks expertly crafts a harrowing portrait of Hendricks as a man defined by loss: first of his father, then of comrades slaughtered on the battlefields of North Africa and Europe, and finally of the Italian woman he falls in love with towards the war’s close.
