There's No Home
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Synopsis
A wartime novel from the author of FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH, in which the survivors of a British infantry company in Sicily find temporary happiness in a lull between battles, in particular a British sergeant who embarks on a love affair with a local girl.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A hugely compassionate account - based in part on the author's own WW2 experience - of the relationships which develop between British soldiers who have just pushed the Germans out of Siciliy and the women of the town of Catania. The story is told as much from the women's point of view as of the officers and men. It is, as Baron says, a story not of conflict, but of the brief flowering of the human spirit in lulls in the fighting.
Baron is finding a new readership both for his war novels (above all 'From the City From the Plough') and his novels of post-war London ('The Lowlife', 'Rosie Hogarth'). This is among his best writing - among the best accounts of humanity amid war. And this edition is splendid - including a photograph found in Baron's papers after his death of the Sicilian woman who may well be the model for one of the main characters.
Baron is finding a new readership both for his war novels (above all 'From the City From the Plough') and his novels of post-war London ('The Lowlife', 'Rosie Hogarth'). This is among his best writing - among the best accounts of humanity amid war. And this edition is splendid - including a photograph found in Baron's papers after his death of the Sicilian woman who may well be the model for one of the main characters.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If Evelyn Waugh's 'Sword of Honour' trilogy is the officer's story of the Second World War, then perhaps Alexander Baron's 'There's No Home' is the NCO's. It was originally published in 1949, the second of the author's three Second World War novels (the others are 'From the City, From the Plough' and 'The Human Kind' - which was made into a highly-regarded movie, `The Victors'). It treats of "the dream time between battles" spent by a company of British infantry in the Sicilian town of Catania in the summer of 1943, during the Second World War.
There is a hint of Captain Corelli's Mandolin about it - the sun is hot, the food scarce but appetising, there is a similar sensuality - but it is closer to home, more familiar. It describes relations between the soldiers and the (mostly) women of the street in which they find themselves billeted. In particular it tells the story of Sergeant Craddock, not long married to a woman he hardly knows, and his relationship with Graziella, a passionate wife of an Italian soldier gone missing while fighting in North Africa. Craddock is a deeply sympathetic character, considerate of his men but never soft, intelligent (he has learned Italian while fighting in Sicily) and tender but never untruthful to his lover.
If ever there was a story to justify adultery this is it. There is in the tale of Craddock and Graziella the innocence of true, brief love, and while the inevitable end is sad, its sweetness depends upon that sadness. It is a kumquat of an affair. Graziella first resists the Sergeant's advances before giving herself wholly. Craddock resents the intrusion of his wife's humdrum letters into the "sealed, timeless life" he is leading in Sicily, but with the resentment comes a "sense of guilt". But it is only a sense, because `home' has been killed "on the parched white plains where so many men had died. The heat had killed it; the stink had killed it; the noise had killed it." It is as though the entire world exists within this one street in which most of the action takes place. (Later on, another soldier, about to be court-martialled, says: "The battalion, well, I mean, it's like your home, isn't it?"). Baron describes a world out of time, in which the immoralities of war far outshadow the infidelities of love.
Baron was born Joseph Bernstein, and grew up in the Jewish East End of London. He was an organiser of the so-called `Labour League of Youth', a communist front organisation, with which he finally fell out, appalled at what he regarded as unnecessary deception, not to mention the Soviet-Nazi pact. His book is free of ideological drag, while always sympathetic to the lot of the common soldiers and the lonely women. He was a much better writer than he was a communist. While the Captain of the unit is monstrous in his treatment of a very young local woman, he is also good to those in his command. He is irked by the OFFICERS ONLY signs that get put up outside restaurants by new arrivals preaching `discipline' with no experience of war ("provosts, staff officers, middle-aged martinets of every kind"). Baron's characters are recognisably, complexly, human, never ciphers.
While Waugh's war is full of moral dilemma and metaphysics, Baron's is practical: soldiers fight and women wail. His characters seem more the victims of fate than of system. Their end is inevitable, sad and true, but there is the lingering knowledge that love has been made in the midst of making war.
There is a hint of Captain Corelli's Mandolin about it - the sun is hot, the food scarce but appetising, there is a similar sensuality - but it is closer to home, more familiar. It describes relations between the soldiers and the (mostly) women of the street in which they find themselves billeted. In particular it tells the story of Sergeant Craddock, not long married to a woman he hardly knows, and his relationship with Graziella, a passionate wife of an Italian soldier gone missing while fighting in North Africa. Craddock is a deeply sympathetic character, considerate of his men but never soft, intelligent (he has learned Italian while fighting in Sicily) and tender but never untruthful to his lover.
If ever there was a story to justify adultery this is it. There is in the tale of Craddock and Graziella the innocence of true, brief love, and while the inevitable end is sad, its sweetness depends upon that sadness. It is a kumquat of an affair. Graziella first resists the Sergeant's advances before giving herself wholly. Craddock resents the intrusion of his wife's humdrum letters into the "sealed, timeless life" he is leading in Sicily, but with the resentment comes a "sense of guilt". But it is only a sense, because `home' has been killed "on the parched white plains where so many men had died. The heat had killed it; the stink had killed it; the noise had killed it." It is as though the entire world exists within this one street in which most of the action takes place. (Later on, another soldier, about to be court-martialled, says: "The battalion, well, I mean, it's like your home, isn't it?"). Baron describes a world out of time, in which the immoralities of war far outshadow the infidelities of love.
Baron was born Joseph Bernstein, and grew up in the Jewish East End of London. He was an organiser of the so-called `Labour League of Youth', a communist front organisation, with which he finally fell out, appalled at what he regarded as unnecessary deception, not to mention the Soviet-Nazi pact. His book is free of ideological drag, while always sympathetic to the lot of the common soldiers and the lonely women. He was a much better writer than he was a communist. While the Captain of the unit is monstrous in his treatment of a very young local woman, he is also good to those in his command. He is irked by the OFFICERS ONLY signs that get put up outside restaurants by new arrivals preaching `discipline' with no experience of war ("provosts, staff officers, middle-aged martinets of every kind"). Baron's characters are recognisably, complexly, human, never ciphers.
While Waugh's war is full of moral dilemma and metaphysics, Baron's is practical: soldiers fight and women wail. His characters seem more the victims of fate than of system. Their end is inevitable, sad and true, but there is the lingering knowledge that love has been made in the midst of making war.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
THERE'S NO HOME by Alexander Baron
Pan Books: 1960
189 Pages
THERE'S NO HOME is a wonderful, complex, very human novel about a lull in the battle for Sicily. The protagonists are a company of British infantry who settle themselves in a small street full of Italian women, whose husbands are away at the war. The soldiers throw themselves into this domestic, womanly world which they have missed for so long. Some of them make mistakes, some of them use the women, some of them grow up. The focus is on Sergeant Craddock, a tough veteran, who finds love with the beautiful Graziella.
As in his other two war books - FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH and THE HUMAN KIND - this is a simple story, told without artifice and motivated by personal experience. Throughout the story is unsensational, warm and knowing. The fundamental decency of the British soldiers, the extraordinary circumstances created by war and the effect of war on men's lives are strongly and sensitively conveyed. Baron's study of men of war at peace is not only compelling but, like all the best books, also deeply affecting and containing recognisable truths. I found Alexander Baron's war trilogy through the historian Sean Longden, read them all, and consider them to be the pinnacle of the British literary response to the Second World War.
Pan Books: 1960
189 Pages
THERE'S NO HOME is a wonderful, complex, very human novel about a lull in the battle for Sicily. The protagonists are a company of British infantry who settle themselves in a small street full of Italian women, whose husbands are away at the war. The soldiers throw themselves into this domestic, womanly world which they have missed for so long. Some of them make mistakes, some of them use the women, some of them grow up. The focus is on Sergeant Craddock, a tough veteran, who finds love with the beautiful Graziella.
As in his other two war books - FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH and THE HUMAN KIND - this is a simple story, told without artifice and motivated by personal experience. Throughout the story is unsensational, warm and knowing. The fundamental decency of the British soldiers, the extraordinary circumstances created by war and the effect of war on men's lives are strongly and sensitively conveyed. Baron's study of men of war at peace is not only compelling but, like all the best books, also deeply affecting and containing recognisable truths. I found Alexander Baron's war trilogy through the historian Sean Longden, read them all, and consider them to be the pinnacle of the British literary response to the Second World War.
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