Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that they seem removed from larger political conflicts, though they replay them in claustrophobic miniature. Edric's imagination has always been drawn to the peripheral, to characters who are set apart, or seeking a geography to match their sense of spiritual exile. For the same reason, his historical fictions tend to cluster at the fag end of things, giving the impression of a camera left running long after the event proper has finished. War's inglorious aftermath preoccupies several of the recent books, the years 1919 and 1946 in particular. In Desolate Heaven (1997), Peacetime (2002) and The Kingdom of Ashes (2007) are populated with men and women bewildered and resentful at having been inadvertently left alive. A twist on the traditional tale of the soldier's return, they follow the homecoming of men for whom home no longer exists.

LRB 4 December 2008 | PDF Download