FICTION: A Whispered Nameby William Broderick, Little, Brown, 346pp, £16.99 HAVING TACKLED the second World War in his acclaimed debut, The Sixth Lamentation, Augustinian friar-turned-barrister-turned-writer William Broderick directs his attention to the Great War in his third book in the Father Anselm series, A Whispered Name.
At the centre of this impressive novel is the figure of Joseph Flanagan, an Irish volunteer accused of desertion in 1917, amid the horror of Passchendaele's trenches. The court martial that ensues provides not only the theatre in which Flanagan's fate is played out, but also a backdrop against which Broderick can examine complex questions of motives and morals during a most brutal time.
The novel opens as Anselm encounters a woman and the haunting figure of an elderly weeping man, in the gardens of his monastery, Larkwood. She has come in search of Father Herbert Moore, Anselm's mentor - now dead - to confront him about his involvement in the court martial and to uncover a long-buried secret. Disturbed by her visit, and her allegations about the man who seemed to Anselm the very embodiment of compassion, the ex-barrister monk embarks on a mission to discover the truth. It is the beginning of a journey that will send him on a paper trail to the Public Records Office, through long-forgotten military records and soldiers' diaries; to meet with war veterans, still scarred by what they witnessed in the trenches; and on a pilgrimage to the battlefields of rural Flanders. More than this, it will lead Anselm into an ethical maze, plunging him back into a time when the needs of the individual were endlessly sacrificed to the greater cause, and where - in terms of a moral code - things were often vastly different to what they seemed on the surface.
Spliced with Anselm's journey into the past is Herbert's own story - the events leading up to and following the court martial, the nightmarish world of the trenches and the profound effect the episode was to have on the young Captain's life. Broderick captures brilliantly the sickening nature of the soldiers' task in having to execute one of their own - the reason why, even at a time of such carnage, to sit in judgment of a peer was among the most dreaded of duties: "No one wanted to sit on a court martial, though no one would admit why: it brought you close to your own fears, your own weaknesses, your own capricious nerve - one day strong, another weak". The whole question of the death sentences meted out by such courts also pitches the struggles faced by the individual soldiers - shellshock, madness, terror - against the need of the army to maintain discipline and unquestioning loyalty to one's brothers-in-arms at all costs, and Broderick uses this emotive material to its full potential, spinning out an interior drama that is every bit as gripping as the events themselves.
In exploring Flanagan's story, Anselm - or Broderick, if you like - also draws attention to a startling statistic about the number of Irish soldiers executed in court martials during the first World War: although Irish soldiers made up just two per cent of the British Army, on conviction, they were four times more likely to receive the death penalty. But unlike, say, Sebastian Barry in A Long Long Way, Broderick is not so much concerned with the political reasons behind this, or the moral quandary faced by Irish soldiers fighting for King and country in the wake of the 1916 Rising. While these events are mentioned, his interest lies more in the personal struggle of Flanagan to find a meaning to all the death surrounding him. Flanagan's yearning for home - a remote island off the Atlantic coast - is bound up with the elemental nature of the land itself and the ways of its people, rather than any political allegiances.
Broderick tells his story skilfully, pacing it well, building up the tension and revealing just enough to keep the pages turning; and while the convoluted but necessary (for this reader, at least) explanations of military law and the particulars of the army's movements and chain of command become slightly tedious at times, they are balanced by some brilliantly evocative and poignant descriptions of the trenches. These are brought to life by well-drawn characters - Duggie Hammond, the compassionate commanding officer; Chamberlayne, his subversive adjutant, and Herbert himself, all decent soldiers worn down by so much stomach-churning horror. There is a certain old-fashioned feel to the language, a kind of politesse, even; Broderick writes elegantly and without ostentation and in doing so often lends greater impact to his observations. Here, for instance, on the desensitising effect of so much death: looking at an imposing comrade, Herbert wonders how he has survived this long. "The tall ones always got shot sooner or later. In the head. It was called being 'clipped' . . . This man will die, he thought casually. A clipper will get him." Oddly enough, it is the more self-consciously poetic passages - about Flanagan's life in Inisdur, and a brief romantic interlude - that are among the weaker in the book, veering towards a sentimentality that is absent elsewhere.
In the wake of so many definitive novels about the first World War, one may wonder about the need for another, but in A Whispered Name, Broderick manages to look at its events from a different perspective. He should be commended for doing so, for he has succeeded in telling a passionately human story about a most inhuman moment in history.
Catherine Heaney is features editor of The Gloss magazine