Customer Reviews

Soldier's Return

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Bragg does a fantastic job bringing this little town from the English North West to life. Bragg's treatment of his characters is very sympathetic and well rounded. His slow meandering way of describing people and event serves to let us know the people very well. Bragg does that not just for Sam and Ellen, but for all the characters we come across in this wonderful work, no cardboard here, they are all very real.

Sam, an ordinary working class man returns home after 7 years fighting on the Japanese front in Burma. Sam returns clearly suffering what we call now post combat trauma, living through it and fighting it. Many from his town were with him in Burma, many never came back, a close friend is suffering a sever case of trauma.

Ellen and Joe lived with Ellen's aunt and uncle during the war. Bragg deals very well with the struggle the family goes through coming together after such a long absence, this at the time of Sam's internal suffering from his memories of the war.

For Sam, a major element of his suffering and to a certain extent his resentment is his feeling that his years of war and service have done little to advance his status in England. Eventually Sam decides with a friend to move to Australia to start a new life; the old life was just too painful to endure after all that he had been through. But Ellen, who lost her parents as a child and grew up with her aunt and uncle, is a fixture of this little town. The town means a great deal to her; it is her anchor. Ellen chooses to stay and Sam decides to go.

Bragg's sequel, Son of War is even better. Both books are wonderful, very human, very real. Bragg does succeed in taking us completely into his world of 40's England

Melvyn Bragg's The Soldier's Return is the memorable and poignant story of Sam Richardson, a young man from rural England who has fought in the Burma campaign in World War II and who then returns home to a world totally different from the world he has left--everyone and everything has changed.

Sam has seen such atrocity that he is now harder and less willing to show a soft side. His son Joe, now five, doesn't know him. His wife has been successful working two modest jobs and does not want to give them up. Sam has been exposed to the outside world, a world which has shown him how limited his future is in the socially inflexible world of Wigton, while his wife Ellen, in contrast, has been supported by the friendships, traditions, and familiarity of this community, where she knows everyone.

The tensions within the family and within individual characters grow and boil over, as stiff-upper-lip-ishness comes into conflict with the human need to communicate and share, creating real drama and intensity. Bragg's written dialogue is completely natural, and his descriptions and his narrative style are simple, as is his choice of vocabulary. The reader will have no trouble following the various threads of the story while learning much about Cumbria, post-World War II social upheavals, and the kinds of personal problems that may have been typical for many other young soldiers. Mary Whipple

Melvyn Bragg's highly acclaimed novel "The Soldier's Return" is a poignant story of a young post-war English family crumbling under the pressure of war induced trauma suffered by the returning spouse and father. Sam's displacement from his domestic environment is mirrored in his wife's and son's futile attempt to rediscover his old familiarity which seemingly evaporated during his long absence. His inability to articulate his feelings about the war locks him into his own world where nobody can reach him. The fragile nexus holding together conjugal relationships is also revealed in the aftermath. The novel opens optimistically with the reunion scene but from there it's downhill all the way. Soon, the nerves start to fray and bouts of anger fill the void. The horrors of war may have reduced Jackie to a mental invalid but Sam is forced to admit that he misses the sense of purpose fighting for kin and country in the jungles of Burma. Coping with the vestiges of the old life is just too much for him. Ellen and Joe are the victims of this cruel irony when Sam decides to build a new future for himself and his family away from home. Bragg captures the tension of disintegrating relationships with a rare economy and insight. He pays great attention to period details with elaborate descriptions of provincial life. The novel is filled with many such passages which will no doubt endear themselves to British readers for the air of familiar nostalgia they create. For the rest of us, they can seem rather interminable. "The Soldier's Return" doesn't break any new grounds. It treads a well trodden path but does it with authenticity and honesty and for that, it is has to be applauded. It is an accomplished piece of work that deserves to be read.