Bomber

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And so for me, above all else, this magnificent novel gave me startling new insights into my own qualities of compassion and humanity, ones that perhaps I didn't really expect to experience within the confines of a novel about a vicious and savage war.

It weaves together the threads of the lives of over one hundred characters within the tight confines of a 24 hour period.We British are not an imaginative people,” the activist Vera Brittain wrote, in the opening sentence of her 1944 book “Seed of Chaos. That Deighton has invested thought in developing his characters is reflected at the end of the book, in which he provides brief summaries of the subsequent fates of the survivors of the attack. My appreciation of this book is Deighton’s acute attention to detail in the development of its locales, characters, procedures, and equipment described page by page. Fictional account of fictional mass bombing attack on a small city in the industrial Ruhr Valley of Germany on the night of June 31, 1943.

I discovered Len Deighton in the late 80's, while stationed in Germany and read everything I could find of his from the post library.

So though the reader is naturally rooting for the British aircrews, you cannot help but feel for the Germans being bombed. Deighton also strives (unsuccessfully) for a bit of Heller-like farce in the person of a base commander who tries to get a reluctant Sam Lambert to play cricket on his team. Four decades ago, probably the most precise novel dealing with the air war over Germany was Len Deighton’s BOMBER. I have always found this the hardest of Deighton's novels to get into, partly because it is so unrelentingly serious, but mainly because its beginning is poor.

The bombers being British, the raid is a night-time one; the Americans who carried out daylight raids are not even mentioned by Deighton. Published by Published by Sutton Publishing Limited, Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire First Edition .Tellingly Winston Churchill – whose executive decision the British bombing campaign was – blanks it out in his history of the Second World War (for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature – there being no Prize awarded for war). Since this was published in 1971, word processors was not something anyone had, so maybe he is right. Deighton describes people in love, people hating each other, people that are experts at what they do and people that are novices or just incompetent. The men, their planes, weapons, responsibilities, attitudes, thoughts, and fears are described in great detail.