The advantage of a story set in wartime is that all the characters are obliged to form a relationship with death. Death is the life and soul of the war party. You can get death to come to parties in peacetime, too. Murders happen. Cars crash. Cancer buds. But he isn't expected in every house, on every street. In the novels of European peace, the consequences of betrayal are difficult to define, let alone dramatise, in the dispiriting but seldom fatal mess of divorce, poverty or failure. In war, the proximity of death makes treachery a clearer action. Death turns the simplest relationship into a ménage à trois: the girl loves a soldier, but the soldier is flirting with death. No scene is too humdrum to be energised by the ubiquity of death. In Ghost MacIndoe, Jonathan Buckley introduces the war in the fifth line with the sentence: 'The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander's mother.' The postman wears a helmet? Something is out there trying to kill postmen? That's war, that is.

LRB 6 September 2001 | PDF Download