Into battle with the son of Wigton

A SON OF WAR

by Melvyn Bragg (Sceptre, 16.99

A SEQUEL to The Soldier's Return with a title like A Son of War might make the heart sink: not more about Wigton, more about Burma and the Second World War. As in Son of Godzilla, sequels that are sons dress like Daddy, swear like Daddy, but don't have the necessary muscle-power. Lord Bragg of Wigton is aware of the trope: the novel opens with the son of war being reared to manliness by his soldier father with the gift of two testicular boxing gloves. This creaky opening smacks of Lawrence, with boy lassified by Ma being toughened up by Pa, the boxing gloves like Oedipal gauntlets thrown down on the Cumbrian hearth. The son of war is torn between his father's warrior machismo and his mother's heart-ofgold social skills, ending up wimping out under the strain.

But the novel, after this ominous start, loosens up, and Bragg moves into a transparently autobiographical portrait of his home town from the late 1940s up to the Coronation, absorbing and affectionate about the little community as it experiences the winter of '47, the Welfare State and the Education Act, Cold War anxieties and the psychological aftermath of the war.

The family story about fathers, warriors and son-rearing is conventional and conventionally told, not really getting any deeper into the question than a realist novel of the 1930s. But there are readers who love a remake, and this is a competent, emotionally honest remake.

There are sections that rise above memoir and novelistic social conscience. Bragg is a good sports writer, really writing very well about sledding, swimming and bicycling. The son of war also goes through an existential, spiritualist-nihilist identity crisis which is described with power and real sympathy. The portraits of characters around the town, despite a certain sentimentality and earnestness, are vivid and convincing.

But it has to be said that the novel lacks narrative drive and form. Bragg might be proud of this, since ordinary life is episodic, a disconnected series of emotional experiences. The novel is about the ways cowardice and secret womanly feeling came to characterise the sons of the soldiers who went to war. This is worthy and perhaps even true. Unfortunately, Bragg's desire to reminisce clashes with the formal severity you would need really to prove such a big, big point.

Copyright 2001
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