Review: In The Wolf's Mouth - Adam Foulds

‘War, huh, what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr in 1970. In the present day, 100 years from the beginning of the First World War, the answer might be ‘propping up the UK's struggling publishing industry’. This year, bookshop shelves will creak under the weight of new releases exploring the 1914-18 conflict, and controversy has already reared its head, with Education Secretary Michael Gove bemoaning the ‘Blackadder view of history’, according to which brave soldiers were betrayed by cowardly and pig-headed generals (as historian Kate Williams pointed out, this theory was first popularised by noted Bolshevik Winston Churchill).  

Adam Foulds has joined the fray by releasing a novel set during the Second World War, specifically the conflicts in North Africa and Italy in 1942-3. Foulds is no stranger to war writing; his narrative poem The Broken Word (2008) was based on the events of the Mau Mau uprising, the British army’s genocidal reaction to an uprising in Kenya as imperial power drew towards an end. His previous novel, 2009's highly-acclaimed The Quickening Maze, was evidence of his ability to weave inventive fiction from real-life scenarios (in that case, Alfred Tennyson's involvement in a scheme to mass develop wood-carvings using a steam engine), a skill he attempts to draw on again in the Sicilian sections of this new book. 

Selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists last year, Foulds was probably the best traditional prose stylist on the list; there is little here that could be called experimental or post-modern. Certainly, you wouldn’t expect to find descriptions of ‘this pristine place in the middle of England that the dark, droning bombers had swept over on their way to flatten Coventry’ in the middle of a Ned Beauman or Jenni Fagan novel. What Foulds has is a gift for isolating minor characteristics (one character, for example has ears that ‘looked small and serious’), and the patience to chart subtle shifts in his characters’ psychologies. In each of the novel’s three strands, the author looks for moments of potential violence, building up to the incidents when his characters’ inward desires become sudden actions, and showing the gradual processes which allow this to happen.

There are comparisons to be drawn between In The Wolf’s Mouth and The English Patient; while it doesn't quite stray in to the realms of homage, Foulds is happy to acknowledge Ondaatje as an influence. The setting is the most obvious echo; in addition, we have Will, a classics scholar who carries a book by Lucretius to war with him (though he reverts to The Wind in the Willows at times of great stress), and a tentative romance between a young woman and a soldier who has been shaken loose from the war and taken refuge in an Italian villa.

The plot follows the progress of the war through the experiences of three individuals, one Englishman, one American and one Italian. All are outsiders in their way, and all find themselves following in the slipstreams of the conflict; while all are damaged by the war, their trauma comes away from the battlefield. Will, the English soldier, is an outcast because of his class. His father was awarded the VC in the Great War, and Will hopes that this war will provide a way out of his dull provincial existence. However, he is denied the glamorous posting he aspires to, even when he name-drops his father, and has to content himself with civilian administrative postings in conquered territories. Ray, meanwhile, is an Italian-American cinephile, who sees frontline action in North Africa, before being pulled from his regiment to participate in the ‘de-Nazification’ of Sicily, mopping up after the army has swept through. Finally, Angilo is a Sicilian peasant, who prospers during the island’s Fascist administration after the expulsion of the mafiosa, but finds his position threatened as the gangsters return in the wake of the American occupiers.

The novel’s blurb foregrounds the strength of Foulds’ battle scenes, and they are certainly well-written; the prose becomes terse as the characters mechanically follow orders, before suddenly switching tempo during the brief bursts of activity; at times the narrative threatens to fragment completely, employing cinematic jump-cuts. More interesting, though, is the way in which Foulds describes the aftermath, the male bonding rituals the characters engage in, seeking out drink, or women, and gradually revealing the way the experience of combat has changed them. He suggests that each of the men undergoes a slow process of change in order to unleash their violent potential, a process which is resisted at each stage, before they eventually adopt ‘the coarseness and expeditious brutality of military manners’. 

Gove would doubtless be annoyed to find out that In the Wolf’s Mouth does rather follow the ‘Blackadder view’, highlighting the chaos of war, the way individuals can be elevated or destroyed according to blind chance. The introduction sees Angilo, working as a shepherd, lying alone in his field, betrayed and left for dead by landlords working in conjunction with organised criminals – a metaphor for the experience of the private soldier. Ray struggles to deal with the fact of his survival, as comrades die around him, while Will is frustrated by his lack of impact on the war. Repeatedly, he engages in intelligence work that could make a real difference to the stability of the occupied areas he is posted to, only to be over-ruled by corrupt or pusillanimous superiors.

Readers will always look for contemporary parallels in historical books of this kind, and it is in Will’s story that these are most obvious. The echoes of Iraq and Afghanistan are faint at first (his unit takes possession of an abandoned mansion with ‘a dining room with a long walnut table and mirrors, several bathrooms with baths on clawed feet, canopied beds’ – squint and you can see the outline of soldiers entering Saddam’s palace), becoming more pronounced as Foulds describes the occupation of Sicily, during which the army works hand in hand with criminals, allowing cronyism and corruption in order to keep the locals from embracing an unwelcome, alternative political solution. The novel’s final stages darkly hint at the brutalising effect of occupation, the way in which violence becomes a stepping stone towards honour and material gain for those who grow up under military control.

The sections based in Sicily do reveal a chink in Foulds’ writing. Talking at a Granta event in Manchester last year, he explained that he had decided to write the novel after intrigued by a strange tale about members of the Sicilian mafia fleeing from Fascism by concealing themselves in false-bottomed coffins and being smuggled out in boats. This episode does make it into the novel, and there are references to Sicily’s ‘frightened princesses, criminal conspiracies, people slitting the throats of dogs, witches’, but Foulds struggles to imbue the book with real quirkiness. The writing is first class, and it is also a very enjoyable read, but maybe In The Wolf’s Mouth remains slightly too conventional to be truly great. That said, it shouldn’t stop the novel making its way onto the prize shortlists this year. With this book, Foulds has shown a confident mastery of conventional narratives and subject material. If his next novel takes this ability down a path less travelled, then he could really find himself among the literary elite.