No Man's Land

October 31, 2016
Inspired by his grandfather J.R.R.’s experiences during World War I, Tolkien (Final Witness) has written a satisfying bildungsroman. Adam Raine is born in poverty in London but rises slightly when, due to a series of circumstances, he is brought to the estate of mine owner Sir John Scarsdale, to be raised alongside his spoiled son, Brice, who becomes Adam’s instant enemy. Adam eventually attends Oxford and becomes engaged to Miriam Vale, a pastor’s daughter from back home. But his happiness is interrupted by the advent of war. Adam goes off with Scarsdale’s coal miners and fights on the Somme, where he finds that the true enemy isn’t the Germans, but the stupidity and shortsightedness of the officer class. Returning home on leave, Adam, haunted by what he has seen and done in the trenches, finds that he can no longer relate to Sir John and Miriam. He makes a fateful decision regarding Miriam and returns to the war, setting in motion tragic events that last into the first year after the Armistice. The novel suffers from its melodramatic plotting and one-dimensional characterizations; Adam and Miriam are good and long-suffering, whereas Brice is as villainous as a character out of Dickens. The novel is entertaining but hardly tells us anything new about the supposed war to end all wars.

November 1, 2016
Tolkien (Orders from Berlin, 2012, etc.) draws from the World War I-era experiences of his famous grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien to spin a saga worthy of Masterpiece Theater.When Adam Raine's mother is accidentally killed during a violent strike in London, his father, a builder and labor activist, moves them both north to Scarsdale, a small coal-mining town, where his cousin got him a job working for the union. The early part of the book takes place in pre-WWI Scarsdale and presents a nuanced portrait of stolid Edwardian England, its class divisions, economic inequalities, and withering aristocracy. Workingmen suffered--"the mine was cruel and the mine was king"--with life belowground chillingly claustrophobic and always dangerous. Adam's father is killed saving the life of the mine owner, Sir John Scarsdale, during a riot. Grateful, Sir John, sometimes trapped by an aristocracy that restrains his better instincts, becomes Adam's patron, bringing him to live in the Scarsdale family home and directing his education. The calculating Lady Scarsdale fears Adam will usurp the place of her younger son, Brice. Adam and the devious Brice become rivals for the love of Miriam, the local parson's daughter, allowing Tolkien further exploration of social mores, but it's a thoroughly old-fashioned, chaste romance. As Adam and his contemporaries are drawn into the war and shipped off to France, Tolkien displays much empathy for the working class, most vividly rendered in Adam's friendship with the miners' sons on the front lines. Characters become the faces of stoic courage or bitter cynicism as an old society is fractured by mechanized murder. Told chronologically through a narrative that marches rather than soars, the story's second half relates England's initial jingoistic war fervor, every able-bodied man pressured to join the cause, but then confronts the ugliness a generation decimated by machine guns, massed artillery, and incompetent generals faced returning home to a jaundiced society. The carnage in the trenches of the Somme is depicted by corpses stacked to serve as defensive emplacements and young lives capriciously snuffed out by the snap of a sniper's bullet. A blend of a Dickensian epic and Downton Abbey, with the author arriving at a conclusion that could allow sequels.

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Starred review from November 15, 2016
Tolkien, grandson of J. R. R. Tolkien, breaks from his edge-of-the-seat suspense novels in this moving fictional tribute to both his grandfather and the men who fought and died in the Great War. Loosely based on John R. R. Tolkien's life, the two halves of the story describe no man's land in both the coal mines of northeastern Derbyshire and the trenches in France. Through an act of astonishing bravery, Adam Raine saves another boy's life during a mine accident, echoing the courage of his father, who dies a hero in a fire at the mine owner's home. This is the turning point in Adam's life: he's adopted by the mine owner and given a chance at worldly success and at wooing the parson's daughter. The war's abrupt intervention, and the machinations of Adam's disgruntled enemies during his absence at the Front, provide a heartwrenching tension, while the pace quickens dramatically throughout the gut-turning episodes of trench warfare. The author's visceral account of the Battle of the Somme underscores the individual suffering and courage involvedan unforgettable paean and a gripping war story, with a sensitive perspective on the home front. This compares in depth of feeling and insight to Elizabeth Speller's The First of July (2013) and to Jeff Shaara's well-researched, absorbing To the Last Man (2004).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)