In Pale Battalions
by Robert Goddard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert GoddardEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-29
ISBN: 0385339208
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Delta
Book Reviews of In Pale Battalions
Book Review: A wonderful variation on a familiar theme
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the story of a woman's search for the truth about the identity of her parents and the circumstances of her birth and early childhood. It is certainly not the first book I've ever read on that theme, but it is the best.
The woman, Leonora, was born during the first World War. Her father was a war hero who died in the murderous killing fields of the European slaughter. But wait a minute: the dates - her own birth and her purported father's death - don't match up. What is the real truth?
Leonora remembers Olivia, her witch of a step-grandmother, and and of course remembers what Olivia told her about her origins. But there wasn't much detail there, and Olivia was so spiteful that anything she said had to be taken with a grain of salt. And over the course of her life, Leonora manages to piece together the truth. Maybe.
Leonora learns some of the stories by virtue of her own research, and some other things she learns accidentally when she is contacted by people who were in a position to know SOME of the story. It is that word "some" that makes this book so fascinating. No single individual or set of documents is able to produce a logically consistent explanation for everything that happened. There is always at least one loose end. But Leonora persists, and finally, as an elderly woman, she believes she has pieced together the whole story.
The book is told flashback fashion, as Leonora relates the entire story to her daughter Penelope, who is by now a grown woman. And it can't escape the reader's attention that almost every bit of information Leonora has acquired has come to her as part of an oral history, related by someone who might have his or her own axe to grind. Once we come to the end, however, the bits and pieces hang together logically - in fact, brilliantly logically, as they always do with Goddard. Somehow the uncertainty about whether we really have the entire truth seems to make the ending more satisfactory, not less.
For me, one criterion for evaluating a book is: does each page make me want to read the next one? Perhaps more than any other writer, Goddard answers that question with a resounding "Yes." He is simply the best writer I have ever read for constructing complex plots that fit together logically with no holes. This is as good an introduction as any to his impressive talent.
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