It would be unfair to accuse Sebastian Faulks of simply repeating himself, the way, say, John le Carré came to do: effectively reprising over and again the same novel and central character to tackle whichever issue preoccupied him at that moment. It is a most unusual novelist with a body of work behind them who does not revisit themes or follow patterns, and Farewell To Eden certainly does that. But the effect is more déjà vu than rote formula. The defence one could apply to Le Carré – that even when his work wilted as fiction, it succeeded as reportage – is not required for Faulks.
The parallel with le Carré is worth pursuing on two points. One is that both Faulks and the later Le Carré favour as protagonists diffident, decent Englishmen afflicted with a certain wraithlike hollowness, an absence of selfhood. With Le Carré, this is usually resolved into purpose by their acquiring a mission and a love interest. Faulks also offers his characters resolution, but nothing quite so quick or convenient.
The other is, both have now written books that are valuable in providing a perspective on the history of Israel that even the more scrupulous – or rather, especially the more scrupulous – of non-fiction accounts would have to circumnavigate. The Little Dummer Girl, written and contemporaneously set in the early 1980s, could be read as apologism for whichever side the reader opposed. One can imagine Farewell To Eden, largely set in the late 1940s, receiving the same response. This is to both books’ credit: each treats all its warring parties, before anything else, as human – something the extreme partisans of one or other side invariably find intolerable.
The novel switches in time between Philip Deval’s service with the British military during the last days of the Palestine Mandate, and as a teacher in a girls’ boarding school in rural England a few years later. Faulks enjoys playing with form, although not at the cost of the story, and he is happy to tip you the wink as to what he’s up to. Deval, while pleasantly billeted in deceptively peaceful Galilee – less an obvious Jesus figure, more an Adam before the Fall – receives from his sister a gift of two books: an Agatha Christie whodunit, and Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Put them together and you have the essence of his own story to come. The Christie is not Cat Among The Pigeons, but anyone who has read that book will recognise straight away the borrowings from its milieu, plot and characters, as they also may the atmosphere of post-war Britain conveyed in David Kynaston’s outstanding Austerity Britain, 1945–1951, acknowledged by Faulks as a key source.
Thus a mysterious death at Witchelm school, Faulks’ proxy for Christie’s Meadowbank, is not that much of a mystery, and the eventual twist hardly a twist at all. But there is no sense Faulks ever means them to be. His Deval, shocked into seeming indifference by the horrors he has witnessed, functions – not unlike Camus’ Meursault – as a passive agent of fate. But it is this mixture of blankness and underlying human sympathy that makes Deval a reliable witness – in as much as Faulks himself is a reliable narrator – of the traumas attendant upon, depending on one’s point of view, the necessary and inevitable birth of Israel, or a disaster for the region’s Arab inhabitants. Farewell To Eden suggests the deeply unfashionable idea (in left-leaning and literary circles, at least) that both of these things might be true at once, and the one does not invalidate the other.
Faulks sometimes succumbs to the temptation, dangled before all fiction writers revisiting the past, to retrofit dialogue; to make characters sound as if they both know and are delivering meaningful glances at the future. But if their words don’t always ring true, the people, events and circumstances feel credible.
Faulks appreciates that history is a messy business. This is commonly understood by many but they, for reasons of their own, insist that this episode of it, and this episode alone, may not and must not be.
Farewell To Eden by Sebastian Faulks is published by Hutchinson Heinemann
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.