Sebastian Faulks’s latest book focuses on the most irreconcilable geopolitical struggle of our age, the Israel-Palestine conflict. While “the sound of mortar and machine gun, the collision of flesh and metal” are integral to Faulks’s best known works, such as Birdsong, in his 17th novel the military presence is a peacekeeping one. It’s 1946 and infantry officer Philip Deval, who saw action in Normandy, is deployed to the Holy Land to take part in maintaining Britain’s mandate in Palestine. Initially Philip is second in command of a battalion overseeing febrile relationships between Jewish and Arab communities. Britain’s profound failures and manipulation in the region, and the imminence of its disastrous departure from the territory, come under scrutiny.
While able to drum up motivation and cheer for the men in his battalions, privately Philip wrestles with inner melancholy. He is “shrouded” in a “loneliness … that insulates him from the world”. Experiences on the battlefield and other, slowly elucidated tragedies have led to his pessimistic bent. Much of what Philip observes in the Middle East, and his “foreboding” sense of its intractable problems, only confirms his despairing sense of human nature. It also underlines his ambivalence towards notions of divine benevolence.
In Jerusalem, Philip and some of his men find themselves in a raucous bar. They jostle along among multicultural crowds, those “with yarmulkes, tarbushes … barehead Armenians and Greeks … [all] playing dice and cards in a mix of tongues”. Philip knows that “soon they would [all] be killing each other … Humans had worked out the movements of the planets and prised apart the indivisible atom; they cured mysterious diseases and found a new way, by trade, of making themselves richer than the sum of their possessions … But a group of closely related people in a fertile landscape couldn’t find a way to coexist.”
This inability to coexist does, indeed, frequently erupt into shocking violence and inevitable reprisals. Faulks captures these with his typically steady and unblinking attention, in scenes where both the seriousness of his research and his instinct for affecting fictive detail is clear. Not long after Philip’s arrival in the region, Zionist paramilitaries bomb the King David Hotel, location of the headquarters of the Palestine police and the British administration. While helping to rescue survivors from the debris, “in a Remington [typewriter] that Philip lifted clear, there were three severed female fingers jammed between the keys”.
Faulks’s plots often cultivate friendships formed in duress. Here, Matthew Kilvert, a priest attached to the peacekeeping mission, has a “genial energy”. He’s fantastically enthusiastic about staging a Christmas production, cast with officers and locals of all backgrounds, of The Importance of Being Earnest. His uproarious Lady Bracknell becomes the talk of the town. Matthew forms an enduring closeness with Philip; their dialogue often glitters with an easy, youthful humour and they are able to share opposing views of what it means to have faith with an instructive conviviality and curiosity. There is a beautiful, strangely rendered moment when Matthew thinks he has had a vision of Christ. Philip listens to Matthew’s retelling of the encounter with quiet interest.
A different friendship also shapes Philip’s progress in the novel. With postwar employment opportunities limited, after demobbing Philip retrains as a French teacher and takes up a post at a girls’ boarding school where he and music mistress Frances Darwood – as stiff as Philip is wont to be – strike up a delicate and important confidence. Over evenings listening to recordings of Ravel and Bach, the two gradually share stories of their pasts and the historical forces that have shaped them. This process proves especially harrowing for Frances. Alongside Philip’s detailed recounting of his time in the Holy Land and the desolate realities of weary postwar Britain, Frances’s horrific wartime recollections contribute to the panoramic ambitions of the novel. Faulks is deft in the management of his ample material, throwing in the odd, energising shift in narrative perspective too – an echo of the more sustained polyphony of A Week in December. There is a lightness and unpredictability in the movement between stories and periods, a kind of deliberate structural restiveness that is of a piece with Philip’s psychic disquiet. This mobility in the organisation of the story culminates in some thrillingly clever late-stage plot developments that are every bit as dramatic as the concluding sections of Faulks’s 2007 novel, Engleby.
While characteristically expansive in its scope, at its core Farewell to Eden is about disillusionment and morally compromised nations, peoples and individuals. The lamenting tone of the title – and indeed of the text at large – reflects a work mourning seeming certainties or easy categorical distinctions. It is a novel that asks us what we might do when unavoidably faced with our own imperfection and fallibility, and is wise and sober in its refusal to trumpet answers.
• Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
