UEL English PEN Society Book Reviews

This is one of those novels which treads the fine line between readability and content perfectly, it managed to get me hooked without talking down to me, and I felt all the better at the end for having read it. It is an elaborate sweeping drama set over a number of decades in and around the first world war. Faulks writes in his introduction that he wanted to try and tell a story which hadn't really been told before, and in writing about the tunnellers trying to take out the enemy from underneath in hideous, staggeringly dangerous conditions, I feel like that is what he has done.

If I were being picky, then I would say that the sections of the novel set in the 1970s are a little unnecessary, and that the rest of the plot and characters work well enough in their own rights to not need the link to a more present day. However, this aside, I found myself seriously affected by the novel as a whole, and think it has rightly earned its place on the shelf as a modern classic about the brutality of war and all that goes alongside it.

Rachael Spencer, guest blogger

Note from the society; Rachael very kindly offered to help us out with some reviews when lost a member from the team at the last minute of the readathon, so thank you SO MUCH, Rachael, for being a friend of UEL PEN. Rachael also happens to be taking over Unbound, our creative writing anthology publication here at UEL, this coming semester. Look out for some amazing work from her and her team here; UEL Unbound