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After producing some thirty-six books set in the High and Late Victorian periods, Anne Perry evidently feels in need of a change of scene and thus is proposing a series of five novels set at the time of the Great War. These, she tells us, though separate and complete in themselves, involve "one story of supreme ambition and betrayal that spans throughout all five and is not resolved until the very last pages of the final book, set in 1918." It is an ambitious project, but not perhaps a wise choice of subject, given the very high standard that has been set by contemporary Great War fiction. NO GRAVES is set in the weeks immediately preceding the onset of hostilities. Indeed, the first deaths take place on the very same day that Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo, as we are reminded with remorseless regularity. As he watches a cricket match, Joseph Reavley, Bible languages professor at St John's Cambridge, is told by his brother Matthew, who works for the Secret Service, that their parents have been killed in an automobile accident. They were driving up to see Matthew and give him a document detailing a plot that would "impeach England's honour" for all time. The document is missing, and evidence emerges that it was no accident that forced the car off the road. Shortly thereafter, one of Joseph's students, Sebastian Allard, is found dead in his rooms, shot neatly through the temple. He has left neither gun nor note and thus must be presumed murdered. Are the two deaths coincidental or related? Need you ask? Perry has considerable trouble holding her plot together here, largely, I expect, because she has to maintain a certain reserve about its details for the space of five novels. But her reticence proves disappointing to the reader, who may be less than willing to wait several years for a resolution. Worse, however, is Perry's style. It was bad enough when she was writing about Monk or the Pitts, when we assumed all that suppressed rage was the consequence of Victorian repression. Now, when she is embarking on a story line that will require the utmost restraint, instead she pulls out all the stops. The reader becomes rapidly intimate with the digestive processes of all the characters, whose stomachs are constantly knotting, gorges rising, and whose insides are awash with pain and grief. When their intestines aren't acting up, characters are clenching their teeth, furiously biting their lips, or are simply numb with overwhelming emotions. They are all tightly wound--the slightest remark sends any of them into an emotional tailspin. If they don't get a grip rather soon, they'll never make it to the Marne, let alone the Somme. Nor, I expect, shall I. If you want Great War novels, I'd read Pat Barker's REGENERATION trilogy, or Sebastien Faulks' BIRDSONG. For crime novels, try Gillian Linscott's HANGING ON THE WIRE or ABSENT FRIENDS, Reginald Hill's THE WOOD BEYOND, or Rennie Airth's RIVER OF DARKNESS. Even the early Charles Todd's are less overwrought than this.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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