Just Finished Reading: Coming Home by Roy E Stolworthy (FP: 2012)

Yorkshire, 1916. On the eve of his induction into the British army Archie Elkin is accidentally killed by his younger brother Thomas in a pointless argument. In a panic, with images of the hangman dogging his every move and every thought Thomas conceals the body and stages his own disappeared in a nearby quarry swimming hole. Taking his brothers place and vowing to die a hero to atone for his crime Thomas joins the hundreds of troops bound for France and the Western Front lines. Hoping and planning to die within days of his arrival he is continually denied a heroes death only seemingly deflecting bullets to those around him instead. As his frustration builds Thomas puts himself in increasingly dangerous situations hoping for a bullet to end his torment. Fate it seems has other ideas. Promoted for his seeming heroism in No-Man’s Land, Thomas is put in charge of a group of men given almost impossible tasks and expected to carry them out no matter the cost. Torn between the responsibility to his men and his deep desire for a meaningful death in his brother’s name Thomas must decide exactly what he wants to do with his young life before he becomes accountable for even more of the deaths he witnesses every day in the Hell that is the French killing fields.

I’ve been looking forward to this book for ages – since I bought it many months ago. It certainly seemed just the thing – the character of Thomas (only 15 years old at the start of the story) seemed interesting complex and the plot seemed to be a solid one. But I started having misgivings early on. For one thing I couldn’t quite get into the novel. There was something, although I wasn’t sure what, that kept me from becoming engrossed in the story or the main character. Something seemed….. off. Part of it was Thomas’s anger and other emotional outbursts. OK, he was 15 in 1916 from a poor farming background but his immaturity really, really grated on me. As did his apparent sexual innocence. He’s a FARM boy, so I’d expect him to know more about sex than most city boys of that age. I found the descriptions of the Western Front to be less than convincing. We had the trenches, the wire, the mud – all of the expected elements but I really don’t think it rained that much, for that long. The soldiers themselves – even the new recruits I found to be far too cynical and felt more like Vietnam vets rather than British Tommies. I don’t think that ‘fragging’ or equivalent actually happened all that often if at all. The folks back home – in London in particular – seemed to be far too modern (rather than effectively Victorian/Edwardian) especially in their attitudes towards sex. Basically I just didn’t believe in the characters, the places or the action – at all really. Everything seemed, in an almost indefinable way, wrong. It was as if someone had tried to construct a story based on a cursory examination of the real events of WW1 whilst subconsciously mixing in scenes from 80’s war movies and anachronistic uses of phrases that the author may have heard in the context of the war (like the phrase lions led by donkeys which, I think, only became currency afterwards). I certainly don’t hold myself up as an expert on the conflict – far from it – so I could be completely wrong here but I just found too much of the book to be completely unbelievable. Which is a shame really as I was actually looking forward to reading this a great deal. Reluctantly not recommended.