"A major literary event." -Carl Rollyson
The Return of the Soldier tells the story of a shell-shocked soldier who returns home from the First World War believing that he is in love with a working-class woman from his past, rather than married to his aristocratic wife. His family and doctor must decide whether to allow him to remain safely in his delusion, or to bring him back to reality and return him to the front. A brief novel with a seemingly simple plot, it is a classic of modernist literature and provides a point of entry into discussions of some of the twentieth century's most enduring themes.
In 1916 on an isolated country estate just outside London, Captain Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, makes a bittersweet homecoming to the three women who have helped shape his life. Will the devoted wife he can no longer recollect, the favorite cousin he remembers only as a childhood friend, and the poor innkeeper's daughter he once courted leave Chris to languish in a safe, dreamy past--or will they help him recover his memory so that he can return to the front? The answer is revealed through a heart-wrenching, unexpected sacrifice.
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For when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court after his marriage, he handed it over to architects who had not so much the wild eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable photos in the illustrated papers.But of late this universe unto itself cannot quite keep out an England altered by ambition and industry. Only a few miles away a "red suburban stain," Wealdstone, has somehow cropped up. And one day all is permanently altered--or, rather, revealed--when a Wealdstone resident comes bearing news of Captain Baldry. Mrs. William Gray is clearly not of Chris's wife Kitty and his cousin Jenny's class, as Kitty in particular makes her aware. "Again her gray eyes brimmed," Jenny observes. "People are rude to one, she visibly said, but surely not nice people like this." How is it, then, that this dreary, "dingy" woman knows Chris and knows that something has happened to him? And how is it that Jenny soon comes to see her as someone "whose personality was sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room"?
In the remainder of this brief, perfect novel, a vanished (or repressed) past and its lost prospect of happiness comes to the fore. Rebecca West is best remembered for Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941), but she displays the same vision--and a similar degree of realism--in her charged 1916 novel. Many readers will passionately regret the book's last twist, even as they know it to be artistically as well as historically true. --Kerry Fried
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