Land of living by Georgina Harding
times literary supplement 20 november 2018
Georgina Harding’s four previous novels – The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, Painter of Silence and The Gun Room – have all explored, in different territories, what trauma does to the psyche. Land of the Living is no exception. The Second World War has ended and a young British officer, Charlie Ashe, has returned to England to marry Claire. His experiences as a soldier in the Battle of Kohima – one of Britain’s bloodiest battles – and the subsequent months he spent lost in the jungles of Assam, are now firmly in the past. He and Claire have moved to a farm in Norfolk that he has inherited from his uncle. Lucky to survive the war, Charlie seems to be slowly restored by working the land. We have a disquieting sense, however, that all is not right.
In Calcutta on the way back to England, he bumped into a woman from home, Julia Esmond. “He saw her lipsticked mouth babbling gaudy words, her blue eyes so sure of him, of that sociable amusing Charlie she thought she recognised.” Charlie denies knowing her and here we see how dislocated he is from his former life and its brittle pleasures.
In spite of both of their efforts, Charlie is estranged from Claire. They decide to visit the family of a soldier who died whilst in the jungle with Charlie. Harding brilliantly illustrates how the miscommunication between the couple works.
“What would you like me to do, darling? Should I stay in the car?
He turned the car roughly, running onto the verge. She was right. She didn’t need to be there. It wasn’t her concern.
No, please come, he said. It’ll be easier if you’re there.”
Charlie realises the impossibility of conveying the most prosaic reality of war to those back home. He tries to explain how cold and rainy it was in the mountains of Nagaland to the dead soldier’s sons but “Somebody must have read them some Kipling. Their jungle was green and hot and out of Kipling, with lurking tigers and snakes looped from branches.”
Harding is firm on the absurdity of war – on a clear day in a Naga village in India, Charlie noticed aeroplanes in the far distance. They were far enough away that he couldn’t establish whether they were Japanese fighters attacking the British, vice versa or American bombers on their way to China and the inference is that there is not a great deal of difference between any of these adversaries.
Charlie is haunted by the skewed logic of war in the most unlikely circumstances – driving in the rain with Claire in England, he thinks how strange the Naga people must have found it that during the war, “it was their land to which these strangers had come to die, where hardly any strangers had ever come before.”
The cost of war – and the post-traumatic stress disorder Charlie is surely suffering – is borne by Claire as well as Charlie. As in Robin Robertson’s recent Booker-shortlisted novel The Long Take, Land of the Living increases our understanding of the often unseen burden carried by those who return from war.
Charlie is frequently absent from Claire – he “wasn’t sure that he was seeing anything in the room anymore, not himself, not the rug, not Claire’s shoes.” She is similarly detached from their reality – she knows it is her role to be light but when she tries, “The words floated and did not feel quite her own.”
This is not, however, a bleak novel. During the War, Charlie might have despaired of the possibility that “decency could mend atrocity” but the quiet, pedestrian heroism of him and his wife ultimately suggests hope.
This review first appeared in Times Literary Supplement