The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

War Corrupts Everything

War extinguishes the lives of many of the (mostly) men who are engaged in it, and many of the (mostly) women and children who are in its vicinity. But, however ghastly these immediate effects, they are trivial in the scheme that war has in mind. This is a novel about the Great War in its real greatness, the corruption of an entire society, sometimes overtly but also (mostly) insidiously, among young and old, rich and poor, educated and ignorant. Everyone pays for war, but not (mostly) through taxes.

The individuals fundamentally changed by war include, of course, its survivors, many of whom are physically or psychically maimed, sometimes grotesquely so. These latter are the undead. The effects of the dead, undead and otherwise injured ramify through the networks of families, friends and workmates that constitute a collective of suffering. These, not the graves of the dead, are where the real corruption takes place: “When the world has been shattered, nothing makes any sense. All hail the power of the bouncing balloon. In the absence of Jesus or him one must accept what one’s given.”

And quite apart from individuals, relationships disintegrate. Children without parents, women without husbands, de-populated towns and villages, are open to infection, both organic and social. The great flu epidemic, which originated in the trenches, was as effective as the Great War in its killing power. Government, established to handle the routine and predictable, becomes inept and even more exploitative than usual. And the ideologies of crackpot spiritualist and political ideas take up residence in the minds of the rest of the population.

So it shouldn’t be all that surprising to encounter a paedophile ring established as part of a public charity and sponsored by a deranged titled family. In the run of things, such an endeavour hardly seems worthy of notice much less prosecution. It seems the ideal literary focus for bringing together the ever-lengthening threads of war. Corruption of the young is how war transcends generations and survives those brief periods of peace. Youth absorbs the mores of war through sex more than formal education. War normalises everything since nothing about war is normal. The abnormal is, strangely, a way of forgetting about what war has accomplished. The rag and bone man can dispose of the remnants.

What’s lost in war is the entirety of a civilisation. Civilisation, as Freud knew, is that which restrains random human impulses. War does not create the impulses but it does release their constraints. As one of the undead laments “It’s too easy to say that we came back as beasts. We were beasts to begin with and then the war brought it out.” War is then a sort of reverse therapy, dislocating everything for the sake of chaotic reconstruction, only to engage in it over again. Civilisation, it would appear, is (mostly) the respite between rounds in which to take a breath and have a wash before re-engaging the foe, and losing another home, another civilisation.

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