Small Wars
by Sadie Jones
Vintage, pp472
It’s the classic second-novel conundrum, the struggle of an author to avoid the one-hit-wonder badge. With Small Wars, that is exactly what Sadie Jones manages to achieve.
After writing four scripts and a play, Ms Jones finally received worldwide acclaim for her novel The Outcast. Originally drafted as a screenplay, the elegantly written and emotionally charged novel won the Costa first novel award, a place on Richard and Judy’s summer read list, and was shortlisted for the 2008 Orange prize.
Small Wars continues where The Outcast left off. As with The Outcast, Ms Jones opts for the emotionally-repressed 1950s as the setting for her second novel. Yet while the main themes remain the same – love, violence and shame behind the travesty of stiff upper lips and social codes – the scope is expanded from a domestic setting to a war zone in Cyprus.
The main protagonist of Small Wars is Hal Treherne, a golden boy born and raised in a military family. Having graduated from Sandhurst, he is impatient to see some action. When he is posted, together with his wife Clara and their twin daughters, to Limassol, in Cyprus, action is what he gets as he is called on to defend the British colony from the natives.
In Cyprus, Hal’s violent world of skirmishes, shootouts and torture clashes with the domestic world of babies, household management, neighbourhood arguments and fear for her family’s safety that Clara inhabits. It’s the Mad Men friction between Don Draper and his wife Betty.
This clash soon develops into a mental separation between the two – Hal and Clara become unrecognisable to each other – “If he’s heard her (Clara’s) name,” Clara thinks, “he wouldn’t have recognised it.” Clara finds comfort in Davis, an army interpreter.
The atrocities and horrors which Hal witnesses and participates in spike his hitherto quiet life and turn him into a man who is incapable of loving – his emotions implode inside him. The marriage reaches breaking point when Hal rapes his wife as his twins sleep in the next room.
Eventually, love endures and emerges victorious against politics, society, and war, but not without scars.
The historical and topographical background to Small Wars is not just a stage to the characters’ struggles, but almost a character in itself – the occupied island of Cyprus, with its dusty villages and guerilla hideouts, is brought to life through the author’s minute research and brilliant writing.
Small Wars may be set in the 1950s, yet its honesty on the effects of war and repressed emotions are universal and remain painfully relevant today.
• For Mr Borg, a book is everyone’s best friend.
The review copy of this title is the reviewer’s own.