In similar vein, Farndale maintains a credible war setting while focusing on relationships shaped and tested by the awful extremes forced upon them in wartime.
He runs two stories in tandem, about a father and son. I appreciated the fact some of the links that emerged were not blindingly obvious. Connections were not all resolved in a hurry, allowing some element of surprise.
The novel opens with a love story, that of Charles Northcote, a World War 2 RAF pilot, and German artist Anselm, who are caught in a London hotel room together and arrested. Anselm is deported to Germany and then sent to a concentration camp in France, where homosexuals were as brutally treated by the Nazis as the Jews or any of their other prisoners of war.
Charles, meanwhile, is dishonourably discharged for gross indecency and left bereft and outcast, unable to contribute meaningfully to the war effort and desperately missing his lover. Eventually he is given a second chance in the military, as a war artist, which provides him the opportunity to go to France, his aim being to reach Alsace and rescue Anselm.
A war we are much more familiar with, the ''war on terror'', frames the second story arc, that of Charles' son Edward, who has recently emerged from a cave in Afghanistan after 11 years held captive by the Taliban.
Traumatised by his experience and the suicide of his wife, who gave up hope when he was declared dead after a decade, Edward struggles to reconnect with life back in England and to understand why he was released after so long. Was a ransom paid, and by whom? Is his friend Niall, a senior diplomat, responsible, and why will no-one tell him anything? Increasing his torment is relentless pressure from the media to get his story, and the fact his daughter, Hannah, looks so much like his late wife, causing a confusion for Edward that puts them both at risk.
As Charles pursues his quest to find Anselm, and Edward tries to reconstruct his sanity, their journeys allow Farndale to paint a larger canvas - about war, about persecution, about the sacrifices made to survive during wartime, especially in captivity, and the compromises needed to put lives back together afterwards.
I have touched only upon the bare bones of the story. It is rich in detail, some of it confronting, which is not surprising given the suffering borne by the protagonists. But ultimately The Road Between Us is a novel about the type of courage only made possible by profound love. It is a moving and credible tale that explores moral dilemmas, some of them fiercely relevant as the war on terror grinds on.
- Caroline Hunter is an ODT subeditor.
