Small Wars

Sadie Jones' Small Wars is a stealth book. At first, it seems like it's going to be your typical slow-to-build story with lovely writing, kind of a dull plot, but something you'd learn from if you read carefully--a style that could also describe a certain kind of Englishman, really. I didn't always feel like picking it up, but I could never put it down and I ended up loving this story of family life in war-time Cyprus, a time in the 1950s when the British were still trying to hold onto "their" little Mediterranean outpost.

Clara Treherne is a good wife who goes out with her two young girls to join her army major husband in Cyprus, She really is a good wife and tries to be brave and tries to not mind that he's off interrogating the locals for terror connections. She tries to become friends with the other wives even though they are not nearly as good as she is. And her husband is a good, good man, too. Hal is one of those morally upright career soldiers who believes in duty and country without being pedantic or insufferable. He's a good leader of men and believes himself to be a good husband, though he definitely depends on Clara's efforts not to cause a scene or a fuss or to complain or to admit to being scared.

So, these are good people, trying to do what they believe is right and just. It turns out, of course, that there is no good and just in war, particularly not in the guerilla type war that the Greeks and Turks, the Cypriots, are waging against each other and against, especially, the British presence. Bad things happen. Bombs are laid on pristine beaches, old men or boys are beaten for information and women are their usual casualties of war. Things degenerate in a slow but steady slide, leaving Clara and Hal slightly bewildered at how this all could happen, how they could find themselves at such cross purposes from all they believed about their jobs, their country and their love for each other.

There are some fairly brutal and sad scenes, though Jones never makes us feel like voyeurs to a horrific highway accident. Instead we share first Hal's and then Clara's fear or disillusionment. When it all becomes too much, when they are lashing out at one another to avoid admitting to their fear and confusion, Hal finally sends Clara and the children to safety in Damascus. But of course, that turns out to be where danger lies and their world is turned suddenly upside down.

This is not a tragedy in the classic sense. There's no grand and dramatic ending. It's more like life and growing up. Both Hal and Clara have to come to terms with the reality of their roles and to let go of the blind optimism they once held. On a grand scale, it feels a little like the cultural shift from the golden-hued nostalgia of the 1950s to the grungier, earthier 1960s. It's not that the shift is bad in itself, but it's a dramatic change in thought and style of living. So it is with Hal and Clara at the end of Small Wars.

One of the things Sadie Jones does brilliantly is to show us two sides to events. She manages to pull off sympathy for both Clara and Hal (and for various other characters), even while we see how poorly they go about executing their decisions. There's a constant theme of misunderstanding, or at least, misinterpretation of each other's moves. When Hal finds a talisman given to Clara by another soldier, what is he supposed to think? But we know the truth. When Hal sends Clara to Damascus, she feels it is a dismissal because he doesn't want to be with her, that somehow she has failed him, but we've already seen what leads Hal to this heart-wrenching decision. The lack of communication is evidence enough to how bad things have gotten for both of them, and there's some question near the end if they'll ever find themselves or each other again. These are the "small wars" that they're fighting, I suppose, but they all add up to the big one.

I wasn't completely happy with the ending. I really wanted the bad guys to get what they had coming and I wanted the good guys vindicated and treated as heroes. Sadie Jones does it better, though. This is a British book, after all, and not everything is black and white, so the characters are left reshaping their lives to fit the new reality of the day. A beautifully written, unsentimental book about the every day shifts in marriage and the inevitable sadness there is to any kind of war-time life.