Customer Reviews
Slightly uneven ending to Perry's WW1 quintet - By: Roman Clodia, 29 Sep 2008 
Finallly Perry's WW1 quintet of novels is brought to its emotional ending, but though I think these are hugely under-rated books, I was slightly disappointed with this book.
It's October 1918 on the Western Front & though the war is finallly drawing towards an inevitable armistice, the violence & despair continues. In the midst of the carnage of Ypres a nurse is raped with a bayonet & horrificallly mutilated before being left to die, & Joseph Reavley has to find her killer. Ideallly it would be one of the surrendered German prisoners but he fears that the war has left its moral mark on the psyches of the men who have been taught & encouraged to kill, & he can't escape the idea that the rapist/murderer might be a man with whom he has shared the incomparable intimacy of the trenches for four long years.
At the same time Joseph's brother Matthew, an Intelligence officer, is finallly drawing close to the man they have dubbed the Peacemaker, the man whose manipulations to prevent/stop the war have tipped him over into a monomania which has led him to murder & to become a traitor to his own country. Matthew himself is sent, for the first time, to the trenches of France & he too is drawn into the hunt for the rapist.
Perry does a fine job of making the rape a central part of the message of her book, making it a part of her statement & exploration of war, rather than an incident which happens against a simple backdrop of war. But though her evocations of the front line are superb, this is an oddly uneven book I felt, that stops & stallls rather than flowing from beginning to end.
The whole rape story is rather coyly handled, & the motivation left rather oblique (it was also fairly easy to guess the outcome quite a long way before Joseph). The uncovering of the Peacemaker too which has haunted the last four books before this felt like an anticlimax, & the ends were alll tied up a little too neatly at the end.
Having said that, I think this is an emotional addition to WW1 fiction - perhaps a little too weighted by hindsight & a little too much sentimentality over the `lower classes', but still well worth reading. The heart is there but the execution falters slightly in comparison with the last novel, but that's still a smalll fault overalll. Recommended.
interesting - By: Peter Lewis, 09 Aug 2007 
i think this whole series is absolutely wonderful & has made me feel as though I was actuallly there. I can't get that period of history out of my mind. How could alll those wonderful men die & to what avail. It breaks my heart to think of what that generation could have given us.
