I wasn’t sure whether trepidation or anticipation was the right attitude to approaching this one. On the one hand: one of just seven nominees for the “Dagger of Daggers” in 2005. Must be good, right? On the other hand, from the cover blurb: “all [Price’s] novels reflect his intense interest in history and archaeology, particularly military history”. And this one presents a present-day intrigue interwoven with a mystery from the First World War, specifically the Somme. Uh oh.
See, here’s three prejudices I have about people with an “intense interest” in First World War military history. One: their interest will manifest in obsession with detail. Two: they will go heavy with the poppies and the mud and the horror and and the senseless sacrifice. Three: they will do that in an unsuccessful effort to disguise the fact that actually they find it all rather thrilling. It all makes me rather uneasy.
And hey, here are my prejudices confirmed. One: especially in its earlier parts, the book is weighed down with information about Royal Berkshires and West Mercians and Tyneside Irish and this ridge and that valley and the other redoubt and which of the former stormed or defended or encamped in which of the latter. Two: all the invocations are there, lions and donkeys and doomed poets and respectful contemplation of war memorials in English villages. Three: well, if you make a thriller out of the material, I guess you must find it thrilling.
Points one and two are problems with the book; point three is part of what it does well. Quick plot summary: our protagonist, Mitchell, is a Somme expert who’s approached by some shadowy government types with some anodyne questions about a map of part of the battlefield. Soon after, he’s nearly killed by assailants unknown, and then recruited by those same government types. They want to know what’s interesting about the map, because people who find it interesting keep getting killed, which suggests that whatever is interesting about it historically is pertinent presently. But to what they don’t know. Adopting a ridiculous disguise, Mitchell and his new friends set about solving both a mystery about events in 1916 and a puzzle about what’s going on in France today—the mystery and the puzzle being inextricably intertwined.
So all that weight of information is presented as part of the mystery, and because it’s mysterious you don’t know how much of the numbing detail is actually germane and how much you can just let wash over you. A friend of mine voraciously reads the O’Brian nautical adventure novels while admitting that paragraphs and pages might just as well just say “shippy ship ship” so far as he’s concerned. The effect is a pleasing haze. But there’s no chance of a similar retreat from attention here. Eventually, through repetition, it’s clear enough what you need to register properly, but for a while it’s heavy going.
The going is heavier for the fact that nobody is allowed to look at a French field without solemnly imagining it covered in barbed wire and trenches and foxholes, and paying due obeisance to the dead of whichever precisely identified units fought there, and reflecting sadly on the passage of time and the transition from live experience to mere memory. Of course this stuff is significant, and of course remembering it matters, but perhaps we don’t need to remember it every other page or so.
As I said, I suspect the reason that the appropriate attitude is so extravagantly demonstrated is that an inappropriate attitude is being suppressed. And when Price actually lets himself gets excited things can get pretty exciting. The past and present mysteries turn out to be skilfully, satisfyingly linked. The past mystery is convincingly concrete, the kind of thing a military historian would genuinely care about. The present day one unspools nicely, the good guys chasing leads and clues and their own tails until they stumble upon the solution. It’s perhaps under-explained—the identity and motivations of the bad guys are rather fuzzy, and the cogency of their plot is debatable—but a little under-explanation is a welcome counterpoint to the over-explanation elsewhere. The climactic 40 pages or so are taut, tense, tight (shame about the fantastical Boy’s Own coda). There are some stock characters—some Yorkshire-accented light relief and a Mademoiselle Sexy Sex—but the main ones aren’t bad.
Although this is Price’s most award-laden book, I do wonder if I might enjoy him more writing in a different period, away from the World War stuff that makes me itch. But I can also see why the thing won an award, and why some people would love it. Caveat Lector, I suppose.