Thomas Jones writes:
The novel begins on 23 November 1963: ‘Last night at 3 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed.’ It was midday in Dallas when Kennedy was shot; ‘Seaman Houston and the other two recruits’ who ‘slept while the first reports travelled around the world’ must be far from home. It may be naive now to regard Kennedy’s assassination as a loss of innocence, though it’s still possible to see why it seemed so at the time. The next day, Bill Houston, who’s stationed in the Philippines, goes boar hunting, and for no good reason shoots a monkey. ‘It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labour.’ This is another loss of innocence, altogether more private than the death of the president, and altogether more real. Houston ‘felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was 18 years old.’

(LRB 29 November 2007)

Picador | hardback 614 pp. |ISBN: 9780330449205