Robert Goddard’s second novel, of his now 26, opens in the 1980s but quickly takes readers back to the horrors of World War I and an entanglement of family secrets that still have bearing on the present-day survivors. Of that genre, no other novel has captured me in the same way as In Pale Battalions. Corgi Books, ISBN: 0552138398 (July, 1993), 526 p., £4.99 / £6.99.There is perhaps nothing quite as gripping as a good murder-mystery thriller. In Pale Battalions is as full of devious and unexpected twists and as compelling as anything Robert Goddard has written. In a narrative that moves between Cheltenham and New York, Paris and rural Wales, Tunbridge Wells and wartime Spain, the conspirators themselves are caught up in a chain of dramatic events that are the consequences of meddling in the dark secrets of the legendary poet.
Beatrix is the victim of a dark conspiracy, one that her loved ones are powerless to defeat.īut nothing is quite as it seems in a Robert Goddard novel. Nearly fifty years later his sister Beatrix is murdered during what appears to be a robbery at her home, but robbery - it transpires - is only part of the motive that underlies her death. Tristram Abberley was an English poet of the 1930s whose reputation was sealed when he died fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Robert Goddard: In Pale Battalions (UK 1993) Penelope at once supposes a simple wartime illegitimacy as the clue to her mother's unhappy childhood and the family's sundered connections with her aristocratic heritage, about which she has always known so little.īut nothing could have prepared her, or the reader, for the extraordinary story that is about to unfold. But Leonora wasn't born until 14th March 1917. The date of his death is recorded as 30th April, 1916.
Amongst those commemorated is Leonora's father. Their journey starts with an unscheduled stop at the imposing Thiepval Memorial to the dead of the Battle of the Somme near Amiens.
At last the time has come when secrets can be shared and explanations begin. Six months after her husband's sudden death, Leonora Galloway sets off for a holiday in Paris with her daughter Penelope. Robert Goddard: In Pale Battalions (USA 2007)
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