Customer Reviews

Strange Meeting

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Set against the horrors of the First World War, this novel portrays the friendship of two young officers. Hilliard is a veteran of combat, a reserved and isolated young man who prefers the stark reality of the front line, where he follows orders and makes only simple decisions based on life or death, to the political and social complications of his previous existence in England. He is initially displeased to find he will be sharing quarters with a new officer, Barton, but he soon warms to the open honesty and affectionate nature of his room-mate. Barton causes him to re-evaluate his approach to the war, to family, and to his whole philosophy of living.

When the inevitable happens, and Hilliard and Barton are sent up to the front line together, Hilliard sees the atrocities of combat with new eyes. He also sees the effect they have on Barton, and for perhaps the first time in his life Hilliard feels the pain of another human being.

An essentially slow-moving novel, this is a sensitive imaginative account of the horrors of World War One. However, it lacks the passion and veracity of, for example, "All Quiet On The Western Front", and shares something of the coldness and distance from humanity of its central character, Hilliard. The plot marches at a sedate, heavy pace towards its inevitable, and predictable conclusion, stopping off along the way to reveal set pieces of battle and bloody demise to the reader. A rather depressing and leaden novel, it perhaps does not deserve the reputation it has gained in the nearly thirty years since publication.

The book is brief, yet the author has crafted it so that every detail counts. Characters are described in depth with precise strokes, but the story never loses rythm. Susan Hill succeeds in conveying the collective miseries of war as well as the intimate tragedy of John Hilliard, a shy young Englishman that does not seem to find his place in life. Isolated from a cold family that is uncapable of providing the love he needs to cope with the horrors he has to face in his life at the front during World War I, Hilliard unexpectedly learns to look at life from a different perspective when he overcomes his reluctance to socialize and forges a deep friendship with an extraverted fellow officer. War is omnipresent in the whole story and takes its heavy toll on the characters. However, a light of hope remains in the (up to a certain extent)open ending. In a few words, the classic tragedy of youth cut short by the nonsense of war skilfully told from an intimate perspective.