Man Booker Prize 2002

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Peacetime
Robert Edric

James Grieve

Peacetime is set in 1946, 13 years before the brazen MacMillan claimed Britain had never had it so good, and just nine months after Britain had never had it so bad.

The air-raid sirens may have silenced and the troops retreated, but the foul stench of war sticks oppressively like smoke to furniture. The D-Day dream has faded fast and the hope pinned on peace has dwindled to despair. A disparate collection of the conflict's human debris is washed up at an isolated community on the Fenland coast.

James Mercer, a former captain in the Engineers, is sent to oversee the demolition of redundant gun platforms. In tow, a disillusioned workforce clings to employment with loathing for its impotence. Mathias is an east German prisoner of war whose family and prosperous livelihood perished in the inferno of British bombs. Consigned to the painstaking dismantling of a nearby airfield, from whence the agents of his country's destruction took flight, his only saving grace is the delaying of repatriation and attendant facing of demons. Demons haunt Dutch Jew Jacob relentlessly. A doomed game of life-or-death hide-and-seek sent him on a journey down Europe's most menacing train tracks, to destination 'Albeit Macht Frei'. And Jacob was one of the lucky ones, if living with Jacob's memories is preferable to death.

This trio of battle-scarred survivors jolts the stagnant equilibrium of the locals with its very presence. Battle lines are drawn across Edric's atmospherically conjured fenland no-man's land and, with drains for trenches and mist hanging like the acrid smoke of gunpowder, it's clear the war's end has not cured the nation's ache. The attrition continues.

When the locals' general, Lynch, returns from his own war, the blitzkrieg begins. Mercer has befriended Lynch's wife and 15-year-old daughter Mary, who acquiesce to the myth that the once violent patriarch will return from his enforced absence a changed man. But the community's fearful anticipation leads Mercer to discover Lynch has been incarcerated in a military gaol for attempted murder, not merely desertion. The shamed soldier returns to rule his old roost with all the belligerence and bravado of a man frustrated at his lot. Mercer, as the agent of change, the Jew and the German, are sitting ducks to Lynch's suppressed rifle fire.

The premise is inviting, but Edric's delivery disappoints. The action is seen through Mercer's eyes and his sanctimonious morality grates. As a protagonist, Mercer possesses that irritating insight that can only be conjured in fiction, leading the reader by the hand through multiple minor epiphanies that the author should be able to deliver by himself. Revelations of great magnitude are dramatically italicised for further effect.

The cod philosophising that seeps through the narrative stultifies the action and plunders the plot's subtleties with didacticism. 'I sometimes think that it is only our imperfect understanding of other people that makes them tolerable to us,' says Jacob, in a typically forced revelation, just pages after Edric has used him to offer a disclaimer. 'My father…was full of such empty profundities as I am,'he admits sheepishly, with a nod to Edric's tendency for grand flourishes.

Time and time again the topos of this novel is explained as if to a child. 'It was not the lingering presence of the distant war in this isolated place, but its absence with which they were all now struggling to come to terms,'we're told as if by a billboard. Well, who'd have thought it?

The dialogue between Mercer and the Europeans is stilted and the narrative loses brio for it. Lynch's arrival is the fuse that should ignite this tale, but his xenophobia is too one dimensional to be effective in anything more than illustrating anti-semitism was not solely a German ill.

In case we missed 'insecurity' as a premise for his wider railing against the world, Edric spells it out for us in no uncertain terms. Jacob's tales provide compelling voyeurism of unimaginable horror, and the eroticism that simmers beneath the surface of Mercer's relationship with Mary adds a dimension of intrigue, but Peacetime is just to obvious to tantalise.

There's no doubt what Edric thinks of his subject, but there's little space for making up your own mind.