These stories owe a great deal to Hemingway,and if they don’t quite live up to Papa’s example they are still vivid, affecting records of soldiers’ experience in AfghanistanFirst, and a declaration of interest. I published a short epic by Dan Clements a few years ago as portion of the Galley Beggar Press ebook Singles series. You may see evidence of bias in the fact that I contemplate his first novel What Will Remain is by some distance the best so far on the Not the Booker shortlist. I contemplate that this book’s connected stories about army life in Afghanistan – and what happens on the return domestic – are vivid and genuine and clearly born of the hard-won experience of Clements’s own time in the Royal Marines. They have emotional,nearly physical heft; the descriptions of the Afghan terrain, and the mental landscapes of the various soldiers, and seem genuine to me. The book is shot through with moments of genuine insight and intimacy – as when a soldier steps outside his air-conditioned pod into the strange “nighttime city smells” of Kabul and gets the “sudden dumb feeling that he is on holiday. Down in the bay that year the spring tides brought the water tall up over the car park and across the road and it was advantageous to sit among the diners on the waterfront and drink and listen to the waves sighing black against the palisade. Related: The Not the Booker prize 2016 shortlist revealed: time to glean reading! Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com