Life’s routines and rhythms – eating, sleeping, washing, thinking – all cease except as sort of splintered fragments of their recognized forms. Existence evolves into a book hacked to shreds by a madman with an axe. The words are all there, somewhere, but any order, any sense, any narrative structure, any meaning, is gone. [loc. 386]
Having enjoyed Radcliffe's Under an English Heaven, I kept him in mind as an evocative and articulate writer of fiction about military and civilian life during WW2. When Airborne showed up at a bargain price, I bought it, and elements of the Sayers / Paton Walsh A Presumption of Death inspired me to read it. I think I was hoping for more RAF: I was certainly hoping for more than the first third of the story.
Medical Officer Captain Daniel Garland arrives in the Netherlands just in time for the Battle of Arnhem, his first battle and a test of his professional skills as well as his mental resilience. One of his patients is a young paratrooper named Theodore Trickey, so dreadfully injured that he's not expected to survive. Garland is determined to do his best for his patient: "You may think it inconvenient he’s still alive, but that’s his choice. Our job is to help him until he decides otherwise." Between chapters of Garland's (present-tense, first-person) account of imprisonment, escape attempts, and negotiations with German doctors, we learn more of Theo's (past-tense, third-person) story: born in South Tyrol, he speaks multiple languages, never knew his father, and has attracted the attention not only of the British military but of Field Marshall Rommel, who seems to have an interest in Theo.
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, this is only the first part of a three-part story: we don't find out what the connection between Rommel and Theo truly is, or how Theo ended up in what passes for intensive care in Stammlager XIB. I'd also like to know more about Garland's history: so far he's somewhat of a cipher, but though his story is less action-packed and daring than Theo's, he too acts heroically.
Radcliffe's prose is very readable, the story (so far) well-paced, and there is humour as well as horror in his depictions of battle and war. I hope to read the rest of the trilogy some time soon...
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