Book review: The Redeemed by Tim Pears

Review by Nick Major

The first two volumes of Tim Pears’ West Country Trilogy, The Horseman and The Wanderers, evinced the pastoral life of Edwardian England. In this final volume, Pears moves a chunk of the action to Scotland. The novel opens with Leo Sercombe aboard the HMS Queen Mary in the Firth of Forth. Leo is a sixteen-year old deck hand in the Royal Navy during World War One. In the meantime, on the West Country estate where Leo used to work, Lottie Prideaux is training to be a veterinary surgeon. The Redeemed follows these two lives with a shared past through the war and its aftermath.

Like, say, Lewis Grassic Gibbon in A Scots Quair, Pears describes how The Great War changed the British landscape and societal norms. The war didn’t only kill people. It killed a way of life. Women like Lottie, for instance, were given the chance, through necessity, of securing jobs they couldn’t previously have countenanced, and agricultural mechanisation accelerated. When a farmer tells Leo, “a tractor can plough a ten-acre field in a tenth of the time it’ll take a team of horses,” he remains unimpressed. At heart, he’s a horseman and a traditionalist.

In certain ways - characterisation, syntax, a preoccupation with the

exterior world – Pears is a traditional novelist. He also knows how to adjust his style and subject to evoke a particular time. Someone setting a novel in contemporary Britain could not get away with writing, “Lottie Prideaux beheld the vicar’s pair of Cocker Spaniels.” No-one beholds anything anymore. We just look at things.

Also, unlike today, most people in the early 20th Century would have read the King James Bible, or had it read to them. Pears is attuned to how this would affect conversations. Here’s Leo’s friend Victor, describing a crisis of religious faith on a trip to the pacific: “They say God was the word and the word was God but who spoke it if not man? I do not know Leo, but the ocean was vast and empty and I thought the world was too.”

Sometimes, Pears gets bogged down in useless detail. It is a poignant narrative turn when Leo returns to Scapa Flow to help recover the sunken battleships responsible for destroying the HMS Queen Mary. But Pears’ description of the meticulous process of floating shipwrecks is too reliant on technical accuracy. Most of us have no idea about engineering such a feat; it only remains for the author to give the impression he does. We don’t need a masterclass. This is a common problem of historical novels: you often see authors straining to keep their stories in a particular time and place, and the prose suffers.

The novel improves considerably when, in the last third, Pears returns fully to rural England. He might not be a flashy writer, but he can bring a character to life in a few sentences, giving us a sense of the eccentricities of country folk, including the subtleties of the Devonshire brogue. When he describes his characters working the land or explores their relationship to the natural world, I could sit here all day and read him.

Leo is shaped by the changes of the seasons and the rituals of farming life. When he returns from the north to set up a smallholding in Devon, he knows the year is “too far gone for haymaking.” After rain falls, the flowers give off “rich odours, like beings that had been woken and breathed out the breath of a long sleep. Leo inhaled the smell. He tried to hold it in his nostrils. He’d known it each autumn, each year of his childhood.”

As a majestic paean to a way of being in the natural world, The West Country Trilogy is a marvel. However, there is one serious fault. The overarching narrative depends on the romance between Leo and Lottie, yet we don’t get a sense of how this emotional preoccupation shapes their minds when they are apart. We just know, through the odd sentence, that they remain in each other’s thoughts. So, when the two lovers reunite it stretches credulity. It’s a shame, but don’t let it stop you: this fine trilogy deserves to be widely read.