Flanders Book

Patricia Anthony's previous novels, from her 1993 debut with Cold Allies, were all SF with a disturbing grasp of alienness and dislocation. Flanders brings us close to another kind of alien--Travis Lee Stanhope, farmboy and scholar, a US volunteer among the strangely accented British soldiers of the Great War. He tells his story in eloquent, pungent letters to a brother at home, moving from the beauties of Spring in 1916 France to the dank hell of the trenches: mud, rats, lice, gas, foulness, death. Stanhope is highly rated as a sniper but for a while drinks excessively to blur the horror. His kindly captain is another poetry-quoting misfit, despised by other officers for his Jewishness. One fellow-solder fits in all too well, being so fond of killing that he doesn't stop at Germans; his murders have terrible repercussions for both Stanhope and the captain. Touches of fantasy or magic realism are supplied by visions of a good and tranquil place, a graveyard where Death is a lovely girl in calico and where one after another of Stanhope's slaughtered comrades and enemies walks through his dreams, peaceful at last. An extraordinary war novel, hauntingly sad but with glints of hope and humour too. -- David LangfordRead More