Saturday, April 19, 2008

A find ...

... Nigel Balchin: Darkness Falls from the Air. (Hat tip, Maxine Clarke.)

It’s easy to forget on reading it now that at the time of publication, nobody knew how the war was going to end, which makes Balchin’s willingness to give his character such an insouciant attitude to the German bombings all the more bold.

I do not find the insouciance at all odd. I got to know very well some veterans of World War II and the Korean War when I was growing up - one had flown gliders behind enemy lines in the European Theater. All of them had this wise-cracking frivolous attitude to just about everything. Yet they were thoroughly serious and utterly competent individuals. The insouciant manner, I think, was the way one coped when facing the very real possibility of disaster and defeat.

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