The Soldier's Return - Hardcover

Bragg, Melvyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340751002 ISBN 13: 9780340751008

Publisher: Sceptre, 1999

Synopsis

When Sam Richardson returns in 1946 from the 'Forgotten War' in Burma to Wigton in Cumbria, he finds little has changed, as far as his own limited prospects go. In his absence, though, his young family has altered immensely. His wife Ellen has found a sense of self worth in her war time jobs, and doesn't want to return to her old life. Their six-year-old son Joe, accustomed to his mother's undivided love and attention, doesn't welcome the father he barely remembers. And Sam finds the traumatic scenes he witnessed in Burma have changed him too, making the confines of this working class Cumbrian town stifling. The result is a family in turmoil, which reaches breaking point when Sam resolves to emigrate to Australia.

Based on Melvyn Bragg's own family and strongly evocative of its era as well as the Cumbrian landscape, this taut and powerful novel sits firmly in the tradition of his hugely popular Cumbrian novels.

About this title

Review

The end of World War II has to be one of Britain's most dewy-eyed, rose-tinted memories. Yearned for years in advance--Dame Vera Lynn built an entire career on such yearning--it spelled the end of the anguishing waiting, the terrible deprivations overseas, and Johnny asleep in his own little bed again. It takes a good novel to make new all the hackneyed emotion of the moment, and a great one to reveal, without sensationalising, the doubts behind the smiles. In that case, this may be a great novel.

By the time corporal Sam Richardson returns from Burma to his Cumbrian hometown of Wigton, the bunting's long gone, and Sam, like every body else, wants to get back to normal. But his plans to return to family life with Ellen and six- year-old son Joe don't run smooth. The war has taken away his old job, while Ellen holds down two; Joe's been raised with other men as father-figures; and Sam struggles to repress what he's witnessed out east. In The Soldier's Return Bragg explores that most unsettling of experiences: returning to a normality that's no longer normal. In Sam, with his undemonstrative reserve and irrational suspicions, he creates a man who cannot heal the mental scars of active service. While Bragg affectingly evokes forties Cumbria, with a sure- footed sense of that time and place's idiom, this is no exercise in nostalgia, but a book whose concerns--how to deal with the happy ending of war--are only too resonant today. --Alan Stewart

Review

A novel written in fine steel sentences and granite paragraphs, classic British fiction, as good as the best. And a book to be read at a slow pace, for two reasons: to savor the writing, sometimes going back over a sentence for the pleasure of it, and to forestall the conclusion ... Fairly hums with suspense. ... From beginning to end, Bragg avoids melodrama, and allows the characters, all of them fundamentally decent, and very quietly heroic, to tell their own stories ... Melvyn Bragg is an exceptionally gifted fictional geographer ... Wigton lives on every page, and so do its people: rich, poor and who knows. But there's not a cliche in the whole novel and not a whiff of condascension ... Like any really good novel, The Soldier's Return is generous with the space it leaves for the reader.
That is only one of its virtues; there are many others. It's nothing new to write a novel about family life, but for a writer of this quality subject doesn't particularly matter. At this level of quality - fidelity to the way the world really works, absolute integrity and poetry where it's wanted - Melvyn Bragg could write about anything at all, and still come out with an exceptional, and an exceptionally good, work of fiction.

(Alan Furst, Washington Post)

Paradoxically, one of this era's most ubiquitous media voices writes with tremendous empathy about the vanished culture of least said, soonest mended ... one of the tautest and fiercest of Bragg's fictions, alongside FOR WANT OF A NAIL, THE HIRED MAN and THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE.' (Independent)

Reads like Lawrence without the lunacy and stodginess. It packs an emotional punch that will even have cynics sobbing by the last page. All of us hanker after unconditional love, the memory of our father's arms around us. THE SOLDIER'S RETURN feels like the book Bragg was born to write (Time Out)

'Fascinating ... powerfully written, Melvyn Bragg is a master of atmosphere ... I believe this to be a very gem of a novel, profoundly satisfying ... a bestseller for certain'
Publishing News

Sympathetic, touching, infinitely believable...this is a highly accomplished novel (Literary Review)

'The book's tarnished family romance has a cold epic simplicity that aligns it with myth as much as social history ... The novel shears away a lot of context to present a close family driven to the edge of collapse by the very stoic silence that has helped pull it through war, hardship and separation. Paradoxically, one of this era's most ubiquitous media voices writes with tremendous empathy about the vanished culture of least said, soonest mended ... one of the tautest and fiercest of Bragg's fictions, alongside FOR WANT OF A NAIL, THE HIRED MAN and THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE.'
Independent

'Fascinating ... powerfully written, Melvyn Bragg is a master of atmosphere ... I believe this to be a very gem of a novel, profoundly satisfying ... a bestseller for certain'
Tim Manderson, Publishing News:

Strong, straightforward, explicit, evocative ... a very good novel ... It is common to compare Bragg to Hardy, Lawrence and Housman as a novelist of place, but more than anyone he reminds me of JB Priestley. He has the same much underrated strengths (Daily Telegraph)

Bragg recaptures a place and society utterly lost to us today...A great achievement... THE SOLDIER'S RETURN is about the turmoil of those who, while fully aware of what is going on inside themselves, remain inariculate not because they are unaware of their thoughts and feelings, but out of stoicism and self-respect - out of an inborn triat which they perversely foster, on the assumption that this approach to life will cause less suffering in the end. It is a good subject for a novelist to explore, and Melvyn Bragg does it most impressively (Guardian)

'Bragg recaptures a place and society utterly lost to us today. The alleys and wastegrounds cottage slums, the bucolic perfection of the surrounding country, are minutely though not laboriously described, while the people are made alive through their talk. This is a great achievement...Bragg keeps a powerful grip on the reader's interest. The unrolling of events is slow and subtle, taking us towards a grand finale...Its dramatic qualities apart, The Soldier's Return is about the turmoil of those who, while fully aware of what is going on inside themselves, remain inarticulate not because they are unaware of their thoughts and feelings, but out of stoicism and self-respect - out of an inborn trait which they perversely foster, on the assumption that this approach to life will cause less suffering in the end. It is a good subject for a novelist to explore, and Melvyn Bragg does it most impressively'
Alan Sillitoe, Guardian, August 99

Edition details

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0340751002
• ISBN 13: 9780340751008
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 346