So Much Life Left Over
Louis de Bernieres
Harvill Secker, £16.99
Review by Russell Leadbetter
TRUE love has rarely run smoothly for Daniel Pitt and Rosie McCosh. In The Dust That Falls from Dreams, the first part of a projected trilogy by Louis de Bernieres, McCosh had grieved, for many years, the death in wartime of her intended, a young man named Ashbridge Pendennis, a friend since childhood.
It took the increasingly religious McCosh an eternity to accept what had happened and to learn to love Pitt, another childhood friend who had, unlike Ash, survived the Great War and moreover had made a name for himself as a flying ace.
They married, had a child and moved from England to Ceylon, to make a fresh start.
But in Ceylon McCosh gave birth to a stillborn, deformed baby. “Then dorasani Rosie gave birth to a monster which had all its guts on the outside, and after that nothing was the same,” Samadara, a Tamil girl who is part of the Pitts’ domestic staff, observes early in the sequel, So Much Life Left Over.
“She became very quiet and ... her servants said she spent a lot of time praying and was becoming a holy woman who was disconnected from the world.”
Though a second, healthy child was subsequently born, a gulf grows between the couple; she longs to return home, he wants to stay. In the event, they return to England, to her adored, clever Scottish father and her intolerably snobbish mother.
The fallout of this return and its impact on their relationship form
much of the spine of this book but,
as was the case with its (considerably longer) predecessor three years ago,
de Bernieres achieves a
kaleidoscopic effect in his narrative
by means of brief chapters about,
or voiced by, other characters:
Rosie’s sisters Ottilie, Christabel (who lives with a bewitchingly green-eyed female artist named Gaskell) and Sophie; Oily Wragge, a skilled mechanic and gardener who works for the McCoshes; and the beautiful, slender Samadara herself, the reason for whose presence swiftly becomes clear.
It says much for de Bernières’ skill that such steady intercutting between different people does not hinder the flow of the narrative or even undermine the book’s structure.
So Much Life Left Over opens in early 1920s Ceylon, with Pitt and his friend Hugh Bassett idling away their time. Both, writes de Bernières, “suffered from the accidie of not being at war”.
Though neither quite missed the killing, “they missed the extremes of experience that had made them feel intensely alive during the Great War, in spite of its penumbra of death”.
The war continues to exert its malign influence. Wragge, who had been a sergeant major during the conflict, is particularly affected, attempting, writes de Bernieres, “slowly and deliberately to come to terms with his war in Mesopotamia and his enslavement in Anatolia, by sorting his memories into the least painful order”.
His ordeal had included an astoundingly long and brutal death march.
Rosie cannot forget the screams of the injured and dying soldiers she encountered as a wartime nurse.
Pitt is forever casting his mind back to the carnage he wreaked and witnessed. The memory of those pilots, Allied or German, who burned to death will never leave him.
He does, however, become friends with two Germans who had manned an obsolete Roland Walfisch which he had forced down and whom he had subsequently captured.
The timeframe of the book extends to the early years of the Second World War. The Bloomsbury Set is alluded to (“Oh, just three friends of ours,” someone says), and even TE Lawrence has a brief cameo, in which he and his host apparently speak of nothing but the latest aircraft and Brough Superior Motorcycles; it’s a less substantial role, sadly, than Bertrand Russell had in the first book when he met Pitt in a
second-class train carriage en route to Cambridge.
Two of the new book’s characters find themselves in 1930s Germany, witnessing the increasingly dark and murderous events there under Hitler (“Germany turned out to be a bleedin’ nightmare, eventually, though I liked it well enough at first,” one says).
Perhaps influenced by what they have seen, both put themselves forward for military service as war breaks out anew.
The episodic nature of the narrative allows different personalities and their motivations to emerge at their own pace, with de Bernières refraining
from passing any sort of authorial judgment.
We learn at second hand why one prominent figure in the book is – partly, at least – the way she is; though she does not allude to this new information even once, she suddenly becomes slightly more deserving of our sympathy, a startling shift given what we know of her.
A will, read out by a self-conscious solicitor, puts yet another figure in the book in a bold new light. Rosie, for her part, is candid enough to admit to her faults, even if only to herself.
As with The Dust That Falls from Dreams, So Much Life Left Over is an immersive pleasure, full of quiet heartbreak, disappointments, ordinary human interactions, people falling in and out of love, bridges being burned, people succumbing to despair while others try to keep going as they try to rediscover whatever it was that made life worth living in the first place.
Louis de Bernieres is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 14
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