Moonlight made a world of the near and the far. The near was vast and black, split up by spaces of nothing, and the far was pale and precise. A bush beside him was a gigantic black, but a star, a remoter sun, was a pin-hole in a bling between shoals of cloud in the low tide of weather. Light was pale smoke which showed things best when it got behind them rather than on them. [...]
Voices clamoured in his head, I can’t go on, I must go on. They’re there, just in front, they’ll wait till you’re on top of them and the shots will go through and through you like the needle of a sewing-machine through linen.
Described in the blurb (accurately, I think) as ‘a lost classic’, this is a reissue by Michael Walmer of Charteris’s first novel. It was originally published in 1953 to instant critical acclaim – there is praise from Rosamund Lehmann and Francis Wyndham on the cover, and Evelyn Waugh selected it as Sunday Times best first novel for that year. I read it as part of the Read Indies month hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.
John Grant is a very young officer who has just been dispatched to the front in Italy, during the Second World War. He has been ordered to lead a recce to a farmhouse to see if German troops are still there, or if they’ve withdrawn. The first part of this novel tracks him moving through the moonlit countryside on this mission, his fear, his doubt. It will come as no surprise that things end badly. The second part of the novel is concerned with John’s life after the war has ended, and his decision to court and marry Jane. Linking these two parts is the sinister figure of Bright, embodiment of John’s shame and self-loathing; the dynamic of hunting; a sense of mysticism:
John found himself on his knees holding the wounded man’s hand. [...] All the tension and ache of his own impotence was now flooded away in a purge of pity. This he understood. This freed him, expanded him with a general affinity which went beyond the lines.
Not Germans, not human beings against us, around us, he thought. But IT. Behind everybody’s face all the time.
With incredible skill, Charteris evokes the weirdness of life on the front lines and the almost unbearable tension of Grant’s nocturnal foray into the unknown. His vivid similes are unexpected, his immersing of us in John’s thoughts and feelings so complete that everything is strange, and everything is psychological. He filters everything so completely his own preoccupations, nobody else has an existence beyond their relation to himself. The white Italian farmhouse becomes emblematic of his struggle to overcome the parts of his character he despises; the Matlock family home where he tries to seduce Jane is a sort of trap. In both situations, John is tested by John and found wanting, by John.
(British infantry moving cautiously through the ruined streets of Impruneta, Italy, 3 August 1944. By Johnson (Sgt), No 2 Army Film & Photographic Unit, photograph NA 17570. Imperial War Museum, found here)
Woven into the wartime scenes are flashbacks to John’s (even) younger days, in which he became inculcated with the standards of masculinity he fails to live up to. Most of them are concerned with his experiences at Eton and his officer training, but the earliest is a disturbing childhood memory. John has crept out of bed to sit on the stairs, listening to the grown-ups at dinner. And then:
John heard a creak above him. […] He looked round and up. A man stood at the top of the stairs. The sudden sight of him was the cold end and blank of thought. The sick wait for this to be different – the sick reluctance to have anything to do with his eyes.
The man had blue sandshoes on, a black overcoat with a collar up and a torch, and the bristles on his peel-coloured face looked like some sort of patchy disease. No sound came from him. He seemed to be looking straight at John; then at his hand and sucked a finger. […]
The man came down ten steps as though he had slid down a wire on a velvet loop […]
Everything is there: the very slightly discombobulating prose, John alone and shut out, the feeling of horror and powerlessness, the malignant figure who I think later becomes elided with Bright in John’s mind.
The destructiveness of John’s self-disgust and solipsism is reflected in love as well as war. John has two romances, if they can be called that. The first is with Susan, who is fourteen and comes to his bed one night. It’s not clear how old exactly John is, charitably let us say he is eighteen, but he feels guilty about this and carries on a secret correspondence with her, deceiving himself that they should marry when in fact it is clear that they have nothing in common. Fortunately, Susan turns out to have more sense than him. His love for Jane is built on an even weaker foundation: he sees her dancing at a party, having never met her, and decides to marry her. Marriage will prove that he is a man and save him from ‘the web of himself’. Jane is preoccupied with her dying father and uncertain in her response to John. His anguish confuses her. Never have I hoped so ardently that a character would refuse another – for both their sakes.