"The Long Shadow"

The serendipity in family research led me to discover this remarkable novel by Loretta Proctor that features an aspect of World War I that is little-known, the Salonika Campaign (my aunt served as a VAD nurse there). It is also an exploration about identity, belonging and sense of place, and it delivers on all counts.

My aunt’s old photo albums show the primitive conditions living in tents that the soldiers and nurses endured, and it is as if the author had these self-same photos at her fingertips as she describes the frustrations of this stop-start campaign, the filth and endemic diseases such as malaria that took a heavy toll.

The first half of the book is in diary form and concentrates mainly on the love affair between Dorothy, an English nurse, and Greek fighter and spy, Costas. The second half tells how Andrew, their misfit son, travels from England to Greece in an effort to find his roots.

Descriptions of the countryside and the old city of Salonika (Thessaloniki) prior to its destruction by fire are just superb and while some readers may find the pace is slowed by too much detail, others will be thoroughly absorbed in the author’s finely-written and sympathetic insights into modern Greek history.

The main characters all have their individual flaws, but are believable. The doctor, Ethan, is a reflection of British grit and decency while Andrew’s anarchic friends, the displaced and impoverished family from Smyrna, can’t afford such niceties of morality but are appealing in their own way.

This is a book to be savoured and not rushed, yet strangely by the end I felt that the characters’ personal stories had an ephemeral quality and were secondary to the fierce landscapes with its violent history and the generations that have inhabited them. It left me with many thought-provoking images that will linger for a long time.

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Bookdepository

Booktopia

---