So many words have been written about a war over which words fail. How could I read yet more and wasn't it an obscene thing to do as entertainment however literary? And yet this didn't feel like a superfluous contribution, quite a feat. And I still don't feel that somehow I really get what the life of a WWI soldier, what the death of a WWI soldier, was really like. I did enjoy the writing, the shifting between the lyrical and the Good Soldier Svejk and I found I didn't tire of the elegant phrases - a country 'dissolving like sugar in the rain' even though the horror was relentless and I did feel at times I could not stand another wave. Willie's puzzled perspective as an Irish soldier was an interesting one, as where those of his friends and relatives: Gretta the girl he left behind, his policeman father and his fellow soldiers, the Irish and the anti-Irish.

In the book bank