The Return of the Soldier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

This review may contain some spoilers so I will begin with my bottom line.This is a tightly written, many layered thought provoking small book. This is not light reading and is for the serious thinking reader. Dame West is given to simile and metaphor that may seem over done, but are brilliantly crafted to support the story line or its subtext.Some weeks back I had reviewed Harriet Hume.  Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy  I found it wordy, florid and felt that I had missed something. This book, her first is better on all counts; including clarity of purpose.Return of the Soldier has been written of as the first book of WWI written from a woman's perspective. Authentication of the claim of first is for others. This book is literally written from a woman's perspective.The central character is Chris, the returning soldier. He received a head injury and is suffering from "retrospective amnesia". That is he cannot remember the last 15 years of his life. He has reverted to a simpler time before he had adult responsibilities, forgetting his wife and instead remembering his first great love. Being a member of the landed gentry he has nothing to but convalesce. Around him are the three women of his life. His childhood companion, Cousin Jenny; his beautiful, snobbish and stylish wife Kitty; and his first love, member of the working class, and long since married Margaret.The story is told by or to the unmarried Jenny. Jenny shares the family estate with Kitty. At some point before he left to fight in WWI, Chris and Kitty had lost their 5-year old son to some disease and Jenny has been acting as Kitty's support in Chris's absence. Through her we see how the other characters react to each other and to her is told the back story of the long ago romance between Chris and Margaret. Kitty is mostly seen as some-what childlike, snobby and selfish; in the end it is her intense love of her injured husband that is most visible.Of Chris we know that before his injury he had been an effective businessman, a responsible holder of the family's Baldrige Manor home and a loving husband.As an injured amnesiac, he is in a kind of adolescence, if still aware that he has to act like an adult. His old love for Margaret is what keeps him together if rather passive.Margaret is an older married working class woman. Her life has not been an easy one. Her face, figure and life style reflect a hard working life but her values are those of selfless sacrifice, loyalty and an essential goodness. Jenny wants to dislike her for her lack of upper class style and manners (Kitty never loses her snobbish view of Margaret and is further effected by her jealousy of her), but sees her as the Chris still does, the inner woman he loved in his youth. The love of Margaret and Chris is realized for us in the quote""Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh"Of the several levels operational in this short book (my ecopy says 77 pages), I could identify at least two.Initially this is the story of how every serving soldier returns from combat changed from who he was. Chris reverts to a more innocent existence. The general statement is that most if not all will be changed by the experience. At this level Dame West uses three different types of people who have to deal with this change. Loved ones (wife Kitty), family (Cousin Jenny) and everyone else (working class Margaret).Having sent the soldier off to war, society has a duty to deal with their injuries and to support their recoveries. Family has to act as intermediaries within the house hold and with society. Loved ones have to find ways to adapt to or cope with the intimate reality of someone who is beloved and at the same time is a stranger.By the end, this is a different but related story. What are the relative duties and responsibilities of the soldier, and buy extension any adult. Chris in his innocence can enjoy his immature love. It is a life fulfilling joyous love. It is a love of the inner person and is never to be changed by time. It is also a love free of duties, bills children or maturity. Chris's love of Kitty is that more adult love. Recognizing her means resuming the burden of their lost child, going back to war and again, by extension, accepting the struggles of an adult life.Some have commented that ending is pat or contrived; in this light, perhaps not so much so.Having previously complained about Dame West being too florid, this book is brilliantly tight. She has a great gift. One phrase used to describe Margaret's husband captures him completely in one phrase: " a man handling a spade without mastery".This time I "get" Rebecca West. This is an admirable book. Short, dense with meaning. It is as meaningful to America in 2012 as it was to Post WWI England. It is not too much to call this great literature about the human condition.

Return of the Soldier was indeed a case study of the effects of the First World War within two fronts, home and on the battlefield. Written in 1919, Rebecca West tells a tale of the ravages of war on the Baldry family, Chris and Kitty and their one-year old son, Cousin Jenny, and Chris’s old college flame Margaret. The story is not at all a triangle of romance, but rather a triangle of conflict that occurs when Chris returns from No Man’s Land and suffers from the effects of shell shock, which results in his memory loss.The book may be considered a novella or short story that covers over 90 pages of a series of flashbacks of memories to piece together Chris’s mindset. And with Jenny’s helpful narration of the story, she provides clarity, but even with that in mind, there is a bit of complexity that emerges within each short chapter. Troublesome aspects on Kitty’s part of the possibility that she may have lost the man she married; especially when Chris turns her away and calls for Margaret whom Kitty asks who she may be, Jenny describes a woman he fell wildly in love with during college, which was 15 years ago and not the present-day as Chris is 36 years old. One of the interesting parts about the story is the attempt to configure what exactly is occurring within the storyline and the anticipation by the end of the book. Indeed, questions do arise such as will Chris recover? For readers familiar with the literature from the period of Modernism, stories are not quite written within a fine line of straight and narrow. Two major elements play a role in the interpretation of what occurred during the war period and after, ambiguity and subtle chaos of the characters. West displays this with Kitty attempting to keep composure and Chris living in his own past world that appeared in order; having lived within the confines of his family's English estate and well catered. When one translates this display, a period to bridge the gap between Victorian tendencies to Modern ones that broke away from conventionality.Although the story may appear short in length, it may take more than one setting to completely understand the premise of the storyline and the characters. And as one reads the relationships between the characters and their dilemmas, truth told through fiction carries some fact years later.

'The Return of the Soldier' is a short novel which describes the impact of a shell-shocked World War 1 officer's return on the lives of three women who love him. Chris Baldry is a man in his mid-thirties, so he has a past, some of which seems eliminated in his memory by his trauma. Although he remembers his cousin Jenny from childhood, he has no recall of his wife Kitty. His mind seems stuck at the age of 20, at which time he had a summer romance with an innkeeper's daughter, Margaret.The story is narrated by the unmarried Jenny, who obviously has had an unrequited crush on her cousin since her childhood. She and Kitty share an appalling snobbery, which is deluged upon the unfortunate and rather plain Margaret: "Wealdstone. That is the name of the red suburban stain which fouls the field three miles nearer London than Harrowweald." "She was not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children." But these bitchy and catty (though very entertaining) insults say rather more about Jenny than they do about Margaret.As time goes on, and Jenny observes the effect that his lost love has on Chris, she gradually sees Margaret's goodness and wisdom, and the once drab woman is revealed as near-saintly.I enjoyed the book very much. Some of the writing is a touch too flowery for my liking, but there are some gorgeous passages, particularly those recalling the young couple on Monkey Island ("not a place but a magic state") in a golden summer, before the horrors of the Great War.The ending is a little too sudden and convenient for me, but I think it does leave the question: was 'curing' Chris really in his best interests, and those of the three women?

The main World War I novel by a woman, "The Return of the Soldier" is based on the home front of Harrow and Wealdstone in 1916 and shows the relationship between shell-shocked Chris and three women in his life. His broken memory wipes out the last 15 years, including his marriage, and sends him back to the love of his life, Margaret.The book was written before the end of the war and transmits the uncertainty, frustration and desperation of those days. In settling how they will relate to each other, the four characters answer questions that loom even bigger than war, such as 'what is a man?', 'what is love?' and, bringing the two together, 'what is honour?'. Only 24 when she wrote the book, Rebecca West was still working out her style as she created this big canvas. The whole story is given yet another slant by the fact that the narrator, Chris's cousin, is a shocking snob - the kind of woman who lost out to social evolution after World War I, but not before she despised the working class Margaret for the clothes she wore and the roughness of her skin.

How can I never before have read Rebecca West? Astonishing. I was aware of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but not of her fiction. This shameful gap has now been addressed by this wonderful novella, an incredibly touching portrait of deep love and of loneliness. And her writing sparkles, some random examples -`I know there are things at least as great for those women whose independent spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the home park of their personal relationships, but independence is not the occupation of most of us. What we desire is greatness such as this, which had given sleep to the beloved'`There was the necessity of seeking the healthful breezes of Brighton or Bognor or Southend, which were the places in which Mr Grey's chest oddly elected to thrive'`Her irony was as faintly acrid as a caraway seed'`I found her stretched on her pillows, holding a review of her underclothing'`She had forgotten that we lived in the impregnable fort of a gracious life'I am indeed fortunate finally to have discovered her - I'm already reading the Aubrey trilogy!

This is a very interesting and well written story about war and social class. One is pulled in initially to the tragic issue of a soldier having suffered shell shock and amnesia from his wounds in the 1st word war. As the story unfolds through the experience of his cousin who lives with him and his wife, another significant character emerges in the person of his first love. This working class woman has been informed that the soldier has been injured and that he wants to see her. It then emerges that he has lost his memory of15 years of his life, has forgotten his wife and longs to be reunited with his lover of his young adulthood.What is striking in this emotionally turbulent tale is the strength of class attitude from the soldier's women towards his former lover. She is despised for being simply of her class and the soldier's devotion to her is almost disgusting to them.

I had never read this author before, and faced with its precise twentieth century prose I wasn't sure that this was for me. By the time I had got to the end I was absolutely converted. The story was simple, a soldier returning from the war - probably the first World War, who had been injured in battle and had lost the memory of his last 15 years. He returned home looking for the woman he had loved before, and did not even recognise his wife. Without giving too much away, he was eventually "saved" but at the same time lost. The saving involved heart-wrenching sacrifice. This was a well written, beautifully descriptive novella. It exposed the intensity of human emotion and showed a then hidden cost of war. If you can find this book - read it.

Written in 1918, this is a very tender and rather poetic account of the return of Chris, a shell-shocked soldier from World War One to the world of weath and luxury created by his beautiful wife and doting cousin. However, his heart is still on Money Island, with Margaret, his first love. Should he be returned to the real world or be allowed to remain happily living in the past? The story is beautifully written though very much a product of its time both in style and content. The portraits of the three women emerge powerfully. Feminists would find find plenty to chew upon here and some of the attitudes to class and wealth would make even those of the palest pink politics gnash their teeth.