Of particular interest to me as a military dependent who logged time in postwar Germany with my Army officer father and took in with my own eyes evidence of the war’s devastation still evident eight years after its end was the picture of the war’s ruin rendered in David Evered’s “The Long Shadows of War.”
There’s this, for instance, from one of the German principals, Gisela, about the scenes she comes upon as she's fleeing the approaching Russians: “The destruction of Koln was as devastating as anything we had seen. … There were no untouched buildings; houses had been reduced to ruins, churches gutted and commercial premises were no more than shells. There was rubble everywhere.” And there’s this from another of the novel’s principals, George, an English soldier doing mine-clearing work, about a scene he comes upon: “Trees destroyed in the firestorm of battle remained, a forest of charred stumps silhouetted against an overcast sky. There were derelict trenches, decayed dugouts and countless rotting trolls of war.”
But finally it’s not so much the war's physical devastation as it is its lingering emotional toll that’s author Evered’s chief concern, with epigraphs from Eliot and Faulkner about the enduring legacy of the past opening the novel, when George’s son, Mark, and his sister, Martina, are going through their deceased mother's effects a half century later. The usual sorts of things they find, George’s educational attainments, his military records and his employment with the railroad, but not so usual, a couple of files with an accompanying instruction from their mother that they never be opened.
Intriguing enough the files are, particularly with the light they promise to shed on their mother’s enmity toward his father as well as the sparse detail she has always given about his accidental death, to make Mark very much want to disregard the instruction and read on, even as Martina and Gisela, to whom Mark is now married, resist, given their still-painful scars from that time, including Gisela having been assaulted and Martina having contracted polio.
On Mark presses, though, along with his son, to unravel the novel’s mysteries, which I won’t detail further so as not to spoil the book's surprises, which are abundant, other than to note that the novel’s larger treatment of the reunification of Germany, which is going on at the time, is deftly reflected in the family’s attempts to come to terms with its own divisions.
Not so deftly managed, though, to my mind, is the novel’s closing paragraph, which with its deliverance of the book’s final message, unfiltered through the book’s characters, is more characteristic of didactic nonfiction than of good fiction:
“War casts long shadows. Casualties occur even after the shooting has stopped. Absences and losses in the turmoil and chaos of war and its aftermath, particularly if unexplained, can generate uncertainties and ambiguities, conflicting passions and emotions leading to bitterness and rancour. Some wounds never heal, leaving indelible scars. There are countless unrecorded casualties of war.”