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About the Book

Every time the dream came it was different and yet he felt that he had dreamt it exactly that way before. The trees, there were always the trees, and the mist and the shadows and the running.

Charlie’s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Northern India are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk with his wife Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. The soil promises healthy crops and Claire is ready for a family. But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie’s mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present.

What should be said and what left unsaid? Is it possible to find connection and forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror?

Format: ebook (240 pages)                     Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 1st November 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

One of my bookish resolutions this year is to catch up with reading and reviewing the books on my NetGalley shelf. Browsing through my Kindle, this one caught my eye because I recall it being highly recommended by other book bloggers and, I’ll admit, because it’s relatively short.

The novel is set predominantly in Nagaland, a mountainous state in the north east of India bordering Myanmar, or Burma as it would have been called at the time the novel is set. I confess it is an area of the world whose history I was unfamiliar with until reading this book. However, as the novel reveals, during the Second World War it became the site of fierce fighting between Japanese and British troops.

The book moves between three storylines. The first is Charlie’s rescue from the jungle by a Naga tribe and the time he spends living with them without the means to communicate in anything beyond basic fashion. Gradually the reader gets glimpses of what happened to Charlie’s comrades and how he came to be alone in the jungle.

The second storyline describes Charlie’s arduous journey through the jungle back to British administered territory alongside a guide and another Naga who joins them on the trek. “There was no way of telling where the border was and Burma began. No name to anywhere. There was only jungle and mountain, and bare slashed mountain and jungle again, and the rivers ran wild in gorges and you could see across but you could not cross them except where the people had swung their cat’s-cradle bridges of vines, which you walked like a dancer, one foot delicate and light before the other.”

Reaching his destination, Charlie is encouraged by Hussey, a local government official with an interest in anthropology, to talk about his time with the Naga people.

“What did they call themselves, your tribe?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should have a name for them. Tell me about them.”
With Hussey there would be names. Words, story, a route, flattened onto a map on a plain wooden table.

The naming of things, or the absence of names, is one of the themes of the book, as is the inability to talk about some events because they are too traumatic to be shared.  Back in Norfolk with his wife, Claire, Charlie is tormented by flashbacks to the scenes he witnessed in the jungle but he keeps these to himself believing people simply won’t understand what the realities of combat can do to a person.  ‘It was a bit of war one didn’t mention, the clearing up. One mentioned battlefields but one didn’t explain what was there. What was there already when they arrived, what had massed there all through the siege, that they had spent more time clearing up than fighting.’

Those back home want to hear about heroes, not the sordid details that are the reality of war.  We get the sense Claire partly understands there are things Charlie just cannot bring himself to speak about.  ‘Their eyes exchanged what they both knew: that he wouldn’t tell it all and that she would humour him by pretending there was no more to tell.‘

I received a review copy courtesy of Bloomsbury Books via NetGalley.

In three words: Haunting, lyrical, intense

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About the Author

Georgina Harding is the author of four previous novels: The Gun Room, The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, which was shortlisted for the Encore Award, and Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Georgina Harding lives in London and on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.