Muddle-on-Marsh
Love mired by time of War
Published February 2021 as eBook/paperback
This sweeping historical novel concerns love and obsession, desperation, heroism and flailing in war … lives lived in an array of European countries.
It recounts the lives of two generations over eight decades, beginning at the start of the Second World War.
It alternates between the lives of battle-hardened officer Rich Lion and his less than militant son Henry. Rich from a ‘make love and war’ generation, Henry from a ‘make love not war’ time.
Rich has a powerful relationship with German ex-philosophy student Christina in post-WW2 north Germany. She has a son Stefan, the child of her dead first husband. They plan to marry …
Henry falls in love with Austrian Anke after they meet on a Greek island and they have a strong relationship for years … However, Anke has to confront her worst fears …
Events unfold in Germany, England, former Yugoslavia, the Greek islands, Vienna, Cyprus, Majorca and Scotland.
Henry enjoys an idyllic childhood in Cyprus, playing with Greek Cypriot boys, not aware of life-threatening dangers. Hapless Henry is a typical, hormone-charged teenager and falls for a succession of girls, one of whom he meets at a disco; boarding school dooms the romance. On holiday in Germany in the mid-60s he becomes a lifelong friend of German Max …
Rich lives in countryside near Cheltenham and is determined in 1939 to escape and fight in WW2. He is in charge of an anti-tank unit in a 1945 battle in Germany in which he or his sergeant kill the German officer in charge of a Tiger tank. This death radically changes Rich’s life.
Despite much of the novel’s intensity, humour runs through it. Often at young Henry’s expense or his friends.
Various themes are interwoven: the ineluctable progress achieved by and destruction imposed by technology, the inevitability of generations repeating and reliving what went before, the importance of uncelebrated good deeds rather than dramatic heroic actions …
Writing trying to bring brief clarity to the muddle.
You can download the Prologue and Chapter 1 of Muddle-on-Marsh below.