top of page
Tim O'Brien

451. Elizabeth Buchan - The New Mrs Clifton


Paul Scott apart, this would I think be my book of the year this year. A library book that Paddy enjoyed, set in post war England. Quite parallel to a Stephen Poliakoff TV series called ‘Close to the Enemy’ which we are watching on the TV at the moment, but this is far better.

The central male figure Gus returns from Berlin in 1945 with a German bride, having effectively ditched a long standing English fiancé by doing so. Gus works for army intelligence which becomes something similar to MI5, interrogating possible Nazis.

The book opens 30 years later with a female skeleton being dug up in a house in Clapham, which is where Gus returns to 30 years earlier with his bride. The post war Brits don’t like a German bride in London, so the suspicion is that it (the body) is hers.

Gus has 2 sisters and is best friends (or more if the chap had his way) with the brother of the jilted bride. All the characters interact in complex ways, the motivation of Gus for jilting Nella and marrying Krista is hinted at but never made clear until the end (or ambiguous there, Paddy thinks).

A brilliant book, all the minor characters (if any are minor) are brilliantly drawn and have complex interrelationships. The post war depression and Anglo German tensions are brilliantly caught; made me think about my parents meeting post war in Germany and a German friend of ours who met her very middle class English partner probably on a Greek island in the 1960’s and has lived with him in England ever since.


Commenti


bottom of page