The Death Of The Fronsac

By Neal Ascherson

Apollo, £18.99

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

IN the spring of 1940, when the Second World War was still in its infancy, a French warship was sunk off Greenock with the loss of many of its crew. It was the result, so it seemed, of an accident, but in the minds of many Greenockians there was more to it than that. This is where Neal Ascherson's story starts, in the town in which he spent much of his formative years.

As a boy, as he recalls in the overture to his novel, Greenock was both an entrance and an exit, the place through which Ireland’s poor poured into Scotland and by which desperate Scots left their homeland to seek a better life on the other side of the Atlantic. The idea of home – what is it? where is it? how do you know when you’ve found it? – lies at the heart of The Death Of The Fronsac, the name Ascherson has chosen to give to the ill-fated ship.

The novel’s narrator, Maurycy Szczucki, known as Mike, is a Polish officer attached to the French navy. Like many of his countrymen he has arrived in Britain after the Nazis invaded Poland. He feels little sympathy for the French who themselves have recently been overrun. “Where would France be tomorrow,” Mike ponders, “when the Nazi-Soviet dragon had finished digesting my country and came looking for its first meal?”

He is billeted with a local family, which includes a grandmother, a young couple, and their daughter, Jackie, who, in witnessing the explosion of the ship, believes she may have been responsible for the tragedy because she had earlier absconded from school. Her father, Johnston, appears to be one of the victims. Her mother, Helen, is a plain-speaking, free-thinking, sexually-liberated woman who, with the coming of a war, has found an opportunity to realise herself while at the same time fending off the unwanted attentions of men who seem to think they’re doing her a favour. When she begs to differ she is given her “jotters”. She, too, is uncomfortable with the notion of home. “This is no my home,” she says. “I’ve nae job and nae place o ma ain.”

Ascherson’s ambitious and affecting novel is at once a thriller and a family saga, reminiscent of John Buchan’s rapacious adventurism and AJ Cronin’s social realism. It ranges over several decades for Mike, like his creator, is now an old man, looking back on an era when paranoia was endemic and the threat of invasion was all too credible. The war and the sinking of the Fronsac haunts the lives of the principal characters. Time and distance may offer some respite but ultimately there is no escaping the past.

Neal Ascherson has waited until he is in his ninth decade to produce his first work of fiction. Inevitably, it is informed by his work as a journalist, in particular his affinity with Poland which, like Scotland, we are told at the last, is “a poor, hard country but a good one, deserving to live in its own choice of freedom”.