Ginger, You're Barmy

Lodge, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140066403 ISBN 13: 9780140066401

Publisher: Penguin, 1984

National Service: two years of square-bashing, kit layout, shepherd’s pie ‘made from real shepherds’, PT and drill, relieved only by the occasional lecture on VD.

Conscription has made Jonathan Browne and Mike ‘Ginger’ Brady prisoners of the British Army. But reckless, impulsive Mike and pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to this two-year confiscation of their freedom. Where Jonathan chooses to keep his head down, Mike can’t help but rebel against those in charge. Then one day Mike goes too far, with consequences that threaten to overturn Jonathan’s cultivated detachment from the idiocies of military life ...

Review:

"Vivid, funny, and with a compassion made all the more moving by the harshness of its military setting" (Daily Telegraph)

"Has the ring of complete authenticity...the mingling of horror and farce are all brilliantly evoked" (A.N. Wilson Spectator)

"Engaging slapstick...the Woody Allen of contemporary English fiction" (Jonathan Bate Sunday Telegraph)

"An authentic picture of the sordid futility of National Service... I found the total recall agreeably unnerving" (Christopher Ricks New Statesman)

"National Service has rarely been better evoked... an extremely well-told, well-organised story" (Times Literary Supplement)

Book Description:

A funny, shocking novel about the trials and traumas of British post-war National Service.