My other birthday book! I read this years ago, enjoyed it, and couldn't find it on Amazon for the kindle, hence the paperback purchase.
I wasn’t wrong a year ago either; it is a wonderful book (described on the blurb mainly as a comedy) but it is no more a pure comedy than Jane Austen.
It is framed as a couple of ex-pats in East Africa, an American and a German. They both farm and are friendly rivals, both married to women they don’t much like; the English wife (married to the yank) is a cipher. But it is really about two English brothers Felix and Gabriel.
Gabriel is in the army, gets married, can’t fuck his wife, and is called up when the war starts, seconded from India to fight the Germans in East Africa (I wasn’t aware that the Germans colonised anywhere much).
He is pretty badly injured, falls in love with the German’s wife (Liesel) who is a nurse, does a bit of part-time spying, both on the Germans and on Liesel, and is eventually caught and beheaded by some natives working for the Germans who are in his pursuit.
Meanwhile, Felix goes to Oxford and is a conscientious objector much to his mad father’s disgust, falls in love with Gabriels’s wife; guilt-stricken she writes to Gabriel to confess and then commits suicide. Felix joins up to try to find Gabriel, terrified as to whether or not he ever received this letter and a lot of the suspense in the plot hangs on this point (he didn’t).
The war ends and it is Liesel’s husband who lets the pursuit of Gabriel. Felix discovers this and goes to fire his gun in anger for the first time in the war, but the German is dead either of influenza or possibly at Liesel’s hands; she didn’t love him and may have loved Gabriel.
What a plot. It is also beautifully written and the narrative of war is brilliant.
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