A SEASON OF PEACE

by G.E. Armitage ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 1986

A quiet, monochromatic novel, narrated by a retired engineer in the British Army, which alternates the story of a 1946 tragedy in a remote coastal village with a painful reconstruction of the death of the engineer's soldier son in Ireland. The author has some subtle and trenchant points to make about commitment to a way of life that can distance the bonding of family and even destroy active compassion. The narrator, son of an Army major whose death had coincided with his only child's birth, and for whom WW I was ""his way of life and recreation,"" had been responsible for supervising the construction, in 1942, of the base for a gun battery in the fishing village of Cable Point. In 1946, with the return of the evacuated inhabitants of Cable Point, he will plan, as per instructions, the demolition of the fortification. Among the wary, faintly hostile villagers and the rabble of little children (watchful, wild, given to random violence) is 15-year-old Mary, daughter of a long-term prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore. Angry, contemptuous, withdrawn, Mary brags to the engineer about all her father must have done, what he'll do for them when he comes home. Her father does return--an ill, deteriorating man, jumpy, exploitative, sardonic, punishing. The villagers and the engineer stand by, bothered, until the inevitable murder. Throughout the Cable Point narrative, the engineer relives the agony, years later, when his son Michael's body is to be returned from Ireland. He remembers Michael in the months before his death--Michael's confusion, his determination not to marry his pregnant girlfriend (he insisted she have an abortion), and his fear that ""he had lost control of what was happening to him."" The engineer, like his father before him, a stranger to his wife and son, had not--as he had not at Cable Point--intervened. A delicate approach--perhaps too understated for some--to a cast of mind in which the ""ordered and secure life"" of the military institution makes all other entanglements unnecessary.

Pub Date: May 20, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION